Diabesity: The Growing Diabetes-Obesity Epidemic with Jonathan Bailor

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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 Live.

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 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. Diabesity I first heard this Dr. Mark Hyman was talking about. I think I saw him do something on Dr. Oz with it. And I was super excited when my buddy Jonathan Baylor came out with the Set Point Diet book and tackled this. So we're gonna be talking about diabesity. What the heck is it? How big of a problem is it? But most importantly, what can you do about it? And Jonathan has totally cracked the code. So I've known Jonathan for years. He's a, he's a computer geek, tech geek, that was his background. And he brought all of that big research and algorithmic brain into the health world, which is really cool because it he approaches things very differently. Super duper left brain looks at a problem and figures out the solution, which is what he's done with diabetes, which is why this interview is so exciting. So let me tell you a little bit about him. He's a New York Times best selling author of the Calorie Myth and the brand new Set Point Diet. You will definitely want this. He's the CEO of Sane Solution and he recently completed filming the miniseries and movie Diabetes with top mds at the Harvard Medical School. So we will have show notes for Jonathan Baylor for this episode and links to both his books@jjvirgin.com diabesity you will definitely want to grab this book. And he has a really cool gift for all of you.

I'll let him tell you about it.

Now, before we dive in, I want to do a spotlight, and I have been spotlighting people who've been leaving awesome reviews every week. Well, now we're doing this twice a week, so every. Every episode, we highlight this boy. I'd love to highlight you. So if you feel so inclined, jump on over to itunes. While you're there. Be sure you subscribe so you don't miss any goodness and leave a review. And then I'll do a big shout out for you too. So this one. And by the way, we all read those. These things. All my team, we love them, love them. So this one says, excellent, relevant, inform five stars by living my life the way I want it to be. There's a good one, and she's from Canada, says, thank you so much for the great information, JJ and crew. And by the way, thank you for saying JJ and crew, because this is, you know, I'm out there doing the interviews, and I have an amazing team. Can I tell you of. Of this, like, takes a. A village, a big village to do all that we do on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, our blogs, the podcast. Oh, the whole crew dives in. And that's why when we get these great reviews, we're all reading them. So thank you for recognizing everybody. I was always a pretty good eater, but tweaked some things last year. Thanks to your book, some Virgin diet convert and happy 10 pounds lighter. Have kept it off for over a year. Awesome. Your plan makes sense to me. Plain, simple, Plain and simple. Keep up the good work with your podcasts. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Living my life the way I want it to be. Love that. Love that screen name. That's super cool. As we all should be. All right, now, before we dive into this awesome interview, I want to share another favorite with you.

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Jonathan Baylor, I've had to stalk you and hunt you down to get you on this show. I'm so glad you're here.

Thank you so much for having me, jj. It is a pleasure.

I know it's ridiculous. I figured you'd been on the show a bunch of times. Like, I just am so shocked that you've never been on the show. I don't know how that happened.

Well, it was, you know, with much anticipation. And now the day has finally come, so we're going to make it worth it.

Yes, it has to be like amazing. Best podcast ever. But this is such a huge subject. Diabesity. I am really excited about your book Set Point, which I have sitting right over here. The Set Point Diet. Let's start. I think this is probably the best place to start with what the heck is diabesity?

Diabesity is when an individual is suffering from both overweight and obesity or either or and diabetes or pre diabetes at the same time. But really the key here, jj, that we really need everyone to understand in our healthcare system, and understand as well, is that if you're suffering with overweight, there is a 90% chance that you are going to suffer with prediabetes or diabetes. And if you're suffering from prediabetes or diabetes, there's a 90% chance that you're going to struggle with overweight. So to put that in perspective, if you smoke for 40 years, there's a 10% chance that you're going to get lung cancer. So this is, you know, when we start talking about weight and we start talking about diabetes, honestly, they're one in the same, and we've got to understand that.

Wow. So, you know, you think about you. You go, okay, well, I know. I think. I know it causes diabetes, or I think I know it causes you being overweight. But I've. I was looking at the NHANES study, and they were saying that. That it was the toxins in the fat cells that were creating diabetes, and that if that someone could be obese and if they didn't have the toxins in their fat cells. And I kind of looked and I went, well, who wouldn't have toxins in their fat? Yeah.

Unless you're living in a bubble, it's pretty impossible to have.

Like, there's nowhere, like, you could go to, like, the most pristine parts of the world, and you still have it. So what is causing this whole. Now that we, like. Obesity creates diabetes, diabetes creates obesity. They go together. What's causing this whole thing?

I want to look at that at two levels, jj. The first is, like, what are the components of the body that break down to cause this? Because I think once we understand that, we can then understand what are the external factors that. That then cause those things in the body to break down. Is that cool?

That's totally cool.

All right, so first is we got to look at this somewhat holistically, and we got to say that your brain, neurological inflammation, specifically your gut and dysbiosis down there in the little microbiota and your hormones being out of balance, all three of those things are taking place and are the underlying cause of both obesity and diabetes. And one of the great mysteries of our time is why in some people, they manifest first as weight gain, and in other people, they manifest first as pre diabetes. We do not know why that happens, but we do know the underlying causes of both, and that's, again, dysregulation and breakdown in the brain, gut, and hormones and how they communicate. Now, when we talk about environmental factors, there is not one cause, as you know. You know, there's. There's food, there's an environment. But from a macro perspective, if we did want to simplify it, it is. We could simplify it to one word, and that's quality. Right. As our air quality degrades, as our food quality degrades, as our relationship quality degrades, as our sleep quality degrades, as these Things as a quality drops, the quality of our health drops. And that's why the focus on living better rather than like, eating less is so key.

Yeah, eating less definitely hasn't helped the matter.

Not at all.

You know, it's because, well, first of all, fat. We can talk intermittent fasting and fasting, but no one's going to eat less for extended periods of time unless they're stuck. What was that research where they're doing the caloric restriction with optimal nutrition? They put them all in that, like, bubble thing, you know, so unless you're going in the bubble thing, you know, probably not working. But you know what I'm hearing here, and it actually makes a ton of sense as you start to look at, okay, poor sleep quality brought on by like, technology and then more stress brought on by technology, you know, and then social isolation brought on by technology and then poor diet, less exercise, more toxins. It's. It's sort of like any one of those things could create the problem. But then you put them all together and take your body as a history book and this genetic labs where now you're flipping switches and that. It's like that whole thing creates a mess.

That's exactly right, jj. And I think that's one of the things I'm really excited about with this new book is that, and to be clear, this is not a criticism, it's just a statement of fact. There are so many books written that focus on one thing like wheat or gluten or fat, and we have to have those deep dives in individual topics. It's extremely important. But as you mentioned, there is nothing one cause of diabetes. There's not one cause of obesity. We need, I mean, if we need to really. And this is one of like, yes, this is a quote unquote diet book, but we take some pretty unique approaches in it. Once we as individuals understand that we personally are of the highest quality and we take on that mindset and then we, we say, look, if I'm a high quality person, I deserve nothing but high quality, and I will live with nothing but high quality. Because there is not one thing except for this abandonment of quality living.

You know what's so cool is, and you did, you do not know this because we've not talked for like a year or two, which is so crazy, will not happen again, Jonathan. But I surveyed my community and I said, if you know where you want to be with your health or your, your weight, what's going on? Number one reason they gave me was that they didn't feel worthy that they did not feel high quality, basically, is what you just said. And I think, you know, when you start with, okay, I'm a high quality person, so how would I like if you had a racehorse? I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't have the racehorse and go, you know what I think? I think you're not going to get to sleep that much before this race and stress you out a bit and I'm going to give you some McDonald's. Like, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't do that with the racehorse. Right. So we need to treat ourselves the same with that and go from this beginning point of, yeah, we're worth it, we're high quality. So how would you treat, you know, a high quality. How would you treat a high quality car? How would you treat a high quality racehorse? And treat yourself better than that because it all starts with you. Now, you call this book the set point diet. What do you mean by that? What is a set point?

Your set point is a fun colloquial way to talk about a much more deep scientific concept, which I will only cover in brief here, which is the concept of homeostasis, which chances are, if an individual took high school biology class, they've heard that term before, which just means that living organisms automatically pursue balance, period. There's a reason there are not living organisms on the sun. That's a very extreme, unbalanced climate. So it doesn't support a biological life. So if you look at, for example, your blood sugar, we all know that if your blood sugar goes up, your body will take steps to bring it back down. And if it goes down, your body will take steps to bring it back up. Same thing happens with blood pressure. And we also know that those systems can break down, those automatic balancing systems, those sort of set point regulated systems can break down. And when they do, we say you have a disease. In the case of blood pressure, it's called hypertension. In the case of blood sugar, it's called diabetes. The same thing applies to the level of fat on our bodies or energy balance. We have set point range of about 10 or 15 pounds that our brain, gut and hormones work together to maintain and defend. And that range can go up or down based on the quality, not quantity, of inputs that we put in our body. JJ that is so important because with quantity, we can pull ourselves away from that range temporarily, but that's why it always feels like our body's fighting to pull us back into it. We quantity pulls you temporarily out of that range, but Quality changes the range itself.

You know, I love that too because the minute you talk about taking things out, people immediately are like, ah, right. And when you focus more on just improving the quality, in fact, even adding, it's a very different mental picture.

And it works with human psychology. One of the most you know, written about in popular psychology books in, in the world is this don't think of a white bear study, which is you tell someone, don't think of a white bear. What do you think about? And the distinction is that the human brain, your mind doesn't understand the word not or no. So if you say not sugar, all your brain hears is sugar. And then it becomes hyper aware of sugar and you have sugar on the brain. And the hardest, the worst thing you can do to yourself if you don't want to constantly be preoccupied with something, is to try to not think about it. Because there is no not thinking about something. You have to pick something else to think about instead. And that's why we always want to focus on substitution rather than deprivation.

Yes, I call it my lateral shifts, my swaps. Because I, well, I learned early on that if I took things out and I didn't give people other options, they actually could do a lot worse things. Like, like I was saying, all right, well don't drink that. And then all of a sudden I'm like, well, I didn't tell you to drink diet soda. What are you doing over there? You know, so you got to give people the better option out there. So diabesity, how do we never go there? Like I'm assuming now, and I'd love to say before I, even before we go there, like, how big of a problem is it right now?

Jonathan, I'm not exaggerating when I say that if we do not take action as individuals and as a nation, the United States of America will literally collapse due to diabesity if, if for no other reason, because of the economic burden. Let me put this in perspective for you just real quick. If you look at just diabetes, so this is just diabetes. And obesity is more common than diabetes. When you put them together, we have total mess. But just diabetes. Two years ago, the economic burden of the United States of the health care costs of just diabetes was around $146 billion, which is a big number. Oh my gosh. But let's put that in perspective. The total health care cost from all sources of tobacco, $50 billion. So 3x more than all of tobacco just for one half of this problem. And then when we look at it from an emotional perspective. I mean that the suffering, the human toll. It is not an exaggeration to say 9 out of 10 of us are experiencing this personally, are on a path to experience it personally, or have someone we love dearly in our life who is impacted by it.

So now that we know that it's. And the other part of this is it's just getting more so. It's not like that's just a static number. This is exponentially increasing. So we've got this issue of this big problem that's just becoming more so and at younger ages. And that's to me the real, real tragedy. So what do we do to avoid it and what do we do to turn it around?

The number one thing we can do is to take a first. I think we kind of just need to pause. We just need to pause and do a little bit of a pattern interrupt. Because frankly, the last 40 years of what we've been taught is so backwards that it has literally caused this problem. Eating less or eating diet food or waking up really early and starving yourself of sleep to go jog on pavement next to cars that are shooting off exhaust. These things are actually elevating your set point and are actually predisposing you to diabesity. And there's nothing worse than trying really hard and ending up worse off. So instead what we need to do again, just like pause, like hit the reset button and then focus on, you know, higher quality food, higher quality relationships, higher quality sleep, higher quality movement, and a higher quality self image or conversation with yourself. And we go over all five of those components in the new book.

Awesome. What kind of results are you seeing?

In the short term we are seeing semi unbelievable results and in the long term similarly unbelievable results, which is great. And what makes me most encouraged is that we've seen that with my team over@sanesolution.com that especially for females who have struggled with their weight for three, four, five decades, we are seeing consistent double digit changes in body composition in 21 days with no hunger or deprivation. And I want to highlight that for a second because I'm not saying it's not, it just magically happens. I'm not saying that there's no effort involved. But to say that in 21 days, someone who is, let's say postmenopausal and who has struggled with her weight for 40 years can gain lean muscle tissue and lose more than 15 pounds of fat in 21 days without ever feeling hungry. Is 21 days, 15 pounds of fat, 21 days? Yes, we're seeing 21 days. We're seeing lean muscle tissue gain of 3 to 5 pounds and fat loss. Just fat loss of up to 15 pounds.

Like, that's insane. I've never heard that.

Yes. And I would tell that is, that would be the best results. The average results you're looking at.

Crazy.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

So what's average? I mean, that's, you know, that's, that's amazing. What's, what is the typical. The results may vary. Results may vary.

But someone who follows the 21 day protocol because it is so therapeutic, on average, let's. And even in the toughest cases, which is females who have weight cycled many times, who are above the age of 40, we are seeing 8 to 12 pound weight loss on average.

I love hearing this too. And I love that you just said that. This is one that drives me crazy. I remember reading, gosh, I'm trying to remember where I read this study. And they go, you know, losing and gaining weight does nothing to hurt your metabolism. I'm like, just, just if you look at what happens when you lose and gain weight, how could it not? Like, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard, you know, especially if you're doing these deprivation diets where you're losing muscle mass and then you're gaining more fat and losing muscle mass. Like, how does that not hurt your metabolism besides hurting your psyche? So there's that side of it too.

And that is so critical. And that's why I just want to highlight, like, when I say, you know, 8 to 12 pounds, I'm saying weight loss. But I want everyone to really understand that, to be clear, in 21 days, you could lose way more weight than that if you just starved yourself. But that's horribly unhealthy. So this is, this is 8 to 12 pounds with none of the side effects of starvation. So that is.

Yeah, when you say fat loss, that's, I mean, that is, I hope at some point, and my buddy Dr. Alan Christensen's really focusing on getting this term out, is we've got to really stop, get off weight loss and get onto fat loss. The last thing you really want to do is lose lean muscle mass. You want to hold on to that as tightly as you can and build it. And you got to lose fat. I mean, and we can't looking at it as the same thing. And losing weight is, is just ridiculous because you could be losing weight. But I always say if you're losing your weight and not losing your waist, you're Making yourself worse, not better. If you're losing weight, but you're not losing fat, you have just damaged your metabolism further.

I love that you mentioned waste measurement because that's. We ask. We do monthly 21 day challenges at Sane Solution. They're, they're free of charge. You just bring the book.

We will put this into you. All the show notes too, for everybody listening. Because I know we've got some goodies for you too. So we will be putting this in so everyone can take advantage of this.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

Thank you. And one of the measurements we were, we require everyone to take is waist circumference. Because I too like you. I wish we would never talk about weight ever again. I wish we would talk about waist. And the average there is 4 inches around the waist in 21 days.

Yeah, that's that. I mean, that's what matters. That is. The key thing is if we learn to look at weight in terms of body composition and look at body fat, then we'd have an entirely different information and we'd also be able to monitor body water. Super important. And then look at waist and waist to hip. All of a sudden now you've got the key metrics that matter. But again, I think a big takeaway we're saying here is, is monitoring your weight. Just as this metric is not giving you the information that you need to know if you're being successful or not. Super duper important. Now I know you have something cool for everybody listening. I always love it when our guests give great free me and gifts. So what do you have for everybody?

Earlier, jj, you asked, you know, how can we get started? What is the one thing we could do today? And if, if we were only talking for 30 seconds, I had to give you a really short answer. I would say the number one thing you could do today to lower your set point and to help you avoid or reverse diabesity is to drink a specific form of delicious but very low in sugar and very high in veggie smoothie. We call these sane green smoothies. And the freebie is a wonderful recipe book that's gonna provide you with 99 of those sane green smoothies, set point lowering and diabesity defeating smoothies, which is delicious and great.

Oh, I love that. Diabesity defeating smoothies. Awesome. So you will be able to grab this. I'll also include some of the links to Jonathan's website to his awesome book. You will wanna have the set point diet@jjbirgin.com Diabesity the thing that I've always super appreciate is you are an insane researcher and then really good at putting things into algorithms. I know that comes from your background, your geek background. Yeah, it sounds like this exactly. Here you went and did deep dive research and then created the algorithm to fix the problem. And it's just awesome because what an important thing to tackle. Thank you so much.

But thank you for having me.

Jj, this is the time where I answer a listener's question. Now again, I want to remind you jjvirgin.com diabecity to grab all the cool stuff from today. And I am going to do a shout out to a question from Carrie who joined me on Facebook and said, jj, my husband just got diagnosed with diabetes. Where's the first place you would start? And I again, you know, I love to put the questions with the podcast so they all fit together nice and neat and pretty with the bow. So here's the thing, and I loved it that Jonathan said this. You know, in the perfect world we'd have a checklist which it sounds like, you know, what you're going to probably be seeing here. And I know his book goes through and covers all of these different areas, but you would look at, all right, blood sugar balance. So a diet that focuses on fat, fiber and protein so that you are really lowering your sugar impact. You've gotten rid of your food intolerances and you're really using food to balance your blood sugar. But sleep is another key one. If you're not sleeping well, you will have insulin resistance. You will have issues with obesity. In fact, great studies show that even if you're eating right and exercising, failure to get your recommended deep quality sleep will put you at risk for obesity. So sleep is going to be key. So is stress, because the same hormones that get messed up with poor sleep get messed up with stress. And stress creates poor sleep and lowers testosterone with men. Next one, of course, is the right type of exercise, which is high intensity interval training, burst out training and resistance training, which helps restore insulin sensitivity and helps your body burn fat better. And then things that help sensitize the insulin receptors like fish oil and vitamin D. Always take that with K. And so when you look at this, if I had to pick one thing, I guess I would probably start with working with the the right diet to help balance your blood sugar. But again, if it turns out that you are not sleeping high quality sleep during the normal circadian rhythm, you could be doing everything else right. And that would be a problem if it turns out that you're stressed out like crazy, right? Or you're deficient in vitamin D or you're not exercising at all. So you gotta look at this all as a comprehensive thing. And so what I would say, Carrie, is look at everything I just said and go, where is he? The falling down the most. Let's start there and then once we get can do that checklist, we'll go to the next. I'm going to do a big shout out again, get the show notes, grab Jonathan's freebie and get the book the set point diet, because that'll help you start to move in this. But again, just if you want to get started this moment, think to yourself, which is the biggest issue. Let's start with that one and then we can add on to all of that. And I think the reason that Jonathan's getting these tremendous results is he's working people through a program where they focus on all of those. They take all of that into play and just fix it fast. And when you do, you get magical things happening like those results. He was saying, all right, I will see you next week. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you do so you don't miss any of the goodness. And hopefully I will see you over on my social media. We can hang out live. 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.

Foreigners this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website. Whatshould I read next podcast.com to find out more.