Does Intermittent Fasting Sound Painful? Get Results Without Suffering!

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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.

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Hey there. I'm JJ Virgin and you are in the right place if you want all the tips and tricks to lose weight fast and stop the weight regain. I've written four New York Times bestsellers and I'm a fitness hall of famer. And helping you live your best health healthy life is what I love to do. So make sure you like and subscribe so we stay in touch. I don't believe in living your life on a diet. There's a reason the word die is in there, right? No one can do that for that long and not be miserable. My approach to healthy weight loss is unique. That's Y o U Nick. Unique to you. I want you to think of diets as therapeutic tools. And what you should get out of them is an understanding of what works for you. So you can create an eating plan that helps you shift from being a sugar burner to a fat burner to a multi fuel burner. Fat, sugar and ketones. And that equals fat fast fat loss. Now, one of the best tools for this is something called intermittent fasting. You've probably heard of it and honestly it's about as close as it gets to being a miracle worker for fast fat loss and helping control your blood sugar. And it also helps heal your gut and it also helps trigger a process called autophagy. That is where you take out the cellular trash. It's super anti aging and it also helps trigger stem cell production, like all of this amazing, amazing stuff. So what is it exactly? Because it sounds a little bit like you're going to be starving and it's not. I'm going to tell you right now, you're not going to be crawling across the kitchen floor too weak to make it to the fridge. You're actually going to feel stronger and more energetic, not weaker. But the reason it gets a bad rap is because that word fast, let's be honest, it's a little scary. Honestly, all that it's doing is creating a little food gap to give your body a break. Now, there's a lot of different kinds of intermittent fasting, but they all focus on when you eat and they limit meals to a specific window of time. So ideally, and this is where we're going to start, you want to make sure that you go at least 12 to 14 hours between meals. That's step one. And between those meals, there's no snacking. I got to say that again because you probably just got fell on the floor. No snacking. You can have water, you can have black tea, you can have tea, you can have coffee, but no food, no snacking. So here's what that might look like. You wake up in the morning around six and then you have a little fasted workout and then you have breakfast. So maybe a breakfast around 8 o' clock in the morning, maybe 9. Then you have lunch. Let's say that you have lunch four to six hours later. So maybe you have lunch around one, right in between that breakfast and lunch, you're not snacking. Reminder. You could have some coffee, you can have some water, you can have some sparkling water, some green tea. All right. Then after lunch you're not snacking, you have something else to drink. And now we're going from like one to maybe six o' clock for dinner. See how easy this is? Then you have dinner. And now look what we did. We just had an easy 14 hour fast. But here's the key thing with dinner. You had dinner and you know what you do after that? You shut the kitchen down and you don't have a late night snack. You got nothing after that. So that's an easy 14 hour fast. So you see how simple this is. But I don't want to get, get ahead of myself here because I really want you to get to 16 hours. But first thing I want you to focus on is let's go 12 to 14 hours. Then we start to, once we get successful there, we pull those snacks out with lots of drinks in between, especially a lot of water. Then I want you to look at 16 hours or even going to one meal a day, once a week. And when you can do that, it's going to amp up your weight loss and it also is going to speed your gut healing. Now might sound a little bit impossible right now, but I'm going to show you how to do it so you don't feel like you're starving because I don't want you to starve. But I also want you to recognize that a little hunger makes you younger. And quite often we're not really hungry anyway. We really just need a glass of water and to calm down. So here's the deal. Your body isn't a bank account, it is a chemistry lab. And long term caloric deficit slows that chemistry lab down. It slows your metabolism and it leads to muscle loss and things like high blood pressure, nausea, dizziness, irritability, cratered energy, low blood sugar and just crabbiness and crappy life. So we're going to avoid that nightmare deal. So first I want you to eat by the plate. So though I have something called the Virgin diet sugar impact diet plate. So what does that mean? Now, we're talking about when you eat, but we're also going to talk about what you eat and how much you eat when you are eating. Because fasting is easier when you're eating clean, lean protein, healthy fats and loads of fiber from non starchy vegetables and a little bit of slow, low carbs. When you do that, you are not going to be as hungry because that really helps you feel full or longer and it keeps your blood sugar more stable. And you might find that you don't even want three meals a day, that you're doing just fine with two. And here's what's cool. That plate creates structure and structure creates freedom. That plate is like your training wheels. That plate is going to help you keep steady blood sugar. It's going to help you stay feeling full longer and satiated and satisfied. And it's going to help you burn fat and control those cravings. All right, that all sound good. Let's break it down. Let's talk about how you fill your plate. Okay, so number one, we talked about clean lean protein. So that is going to be somewhere between 20 and 40 grams. At least 20 grams. But for most of us, we need about 30 grams at each serving. Now, if you are a big guy or an athletic woman or you're recovering from a surgery or an injury, you can have a little bit more, but generally it's going to be somewhere in that 20 to 40 grams, 30 grams average. All right, next up, zero to two servings. So I said loads of fiber that's coming from non starchy vegetables and slow, low carbs. 0 to 2 servings of slow, low carbs at each meal. What is a slow, low carb? That is something like berries or slightly ripe bananas, wild rice, potatoes, especially if they're cool, to elevate the resistance. Starch, squashes, so any of the lentils, legumes, but you don't have to actually eat those if you don't want to. And the more metabolically flexible, you may find that on days that you're not exercising or you're going keto for a couple days, you take that down to zero. And that's totally fine, too. But generally I find people do well with one to two servings of those. And if you're trying to drop fat a little faster, just bring it down a little bit. Now, the key thing, though is you are keeping in the servings of non starchy vegetables. And I want you to get at least 5 servings of non starchy vegetables a day more is better. I love 10. And that means that each meal you're getting at least 2 servings in. Now, I want you to go crazy on these so you can have at it on the broccoli, the brussels sprouts, the cauliflower. Cauliflower rice is a great way to get in non starchy vegetables. And here's a simple math. A half a cup of cooked or a cup of raw is a serving there. Now, here's what's important. Food is information. Eating like this sends the message to your body to help keep blood sugar stable, insulin low. And by the way, there's one more part to the plate. There's the clean protein, there's the slow, low carbs, and the non starchy vegetables for the fiber. And then of course, there's the healthy fats. And you're getting one to three servings of healthy fats in at each meal, too. What are those? Those are things like nuts and seeds and avocado, which is bonus points for both of those because they also have loads of fiber and things like olives and olive oil and wild fish. Here's what's important about all of that. When you're eating the fiber, you're eating the protein, and you're eating the healthy fats. The fiber and protein together work to keep ghrelin, the hormone produced by the stomach, to tell you you're hungry, to keep it down and calm and in check. And the fat triggers release of certain neuropeptides in your intestines, tell your brain that you're full. So all of this works together to just keep you feeling great, keep your insulin and blood sugar lower and more stable and keep you feeling satiated and not craving. All right? Because if you're satiated, then it's much easier to do the next thing, which is to stop the snacking. Now, for a lot of people, if you're. If you're awake, you're eating. In fact, what I heard is that the average person is eating 15 to 16 hours a day, every couple hours. Holy smokes, smokes. What you want to do is give your body a break. You want to go four to six hours between meals because you ate by the plate. So you've got stable blood sugar and you're not hungry, right? Super duper important. So, and remember, if you are eating, if you're snacking, every time you eat, you raise blood sugar. If you raise blood sugar, you raise insulin. Okay? So let's say this is blood sugar, and now this is insulin. Now, insulin doesn't react real fast, but it brings blood sugar back down. If you now have another snack before you've given your insulin time to come back down again, you keep it bumped up again. If insulin stays up, you are locking the doors to your fat cells. You cannot burn fat. And when you do that, you start to increase your body's inability to hear insulin. You become more insulin resistant, problematic, which means you're also more inflamed. So snacking is going to put the pounds on you. Even if you're eating healthy stuff, too much healthy food is unhealthy. All right, Snacking puts the pounds on you and literally no matter when you do it. But obviously the worst time of all is nighttime snacking. And I also think your evil twin really comes out at night. Usually at night you're not going, you know what, I'm going to snack and I'm going to have some wild salmon and some broccoli. I'm betting that's not what you're doing. So super important we know that nighttime snacking increases your risk of obesity. And that fasting window that I really want you to focus on is after dinner to when you break the fast in the morning. That is when you're going to get that biggest hit, the biggest benefits. That's what's going to help you lower inflammation. It's going to help you get that blood sugar under control, become more insulin sensitive. It's going to jump start your fat burning. And the more that you're doing this, if you're doing these longer ones where you're getting 16 hours of fasting, you're also going to help with stem cell production, which is, by the way, de aging, right? So if you're struggling a bit, have a glass of water, have some ice cream, tea, have a little bit of black coffee. Because honestly, I find so often you're not hungry, you might just be bored or you're thirsty. And if you are actually hungry, all right, look back at your last meal and see what you ate and make sure that you really did eat by the plate of cleaning protein, healthy fats and, and fiber from slow low carbs and loads of non starchy vegetables. And speaking of fiber, one of the best things that you can do is just increase your fiber. Now the average person is getting 5 to 14 grams of fiber a day. I want you to have 50 plus. That does not mean that I want you to be an overachiever and go from 5 to 50. Today you will be mad at me and I'LL get bad comments. What I want you to do is increase that over time, not overnight. Maybe in two to three weeks. You want to increase your fiber because fiber helps you feel fuller, longer and it also is going to help you burn fat. Also, it's an amazing way to manage your blood sugar and cholesterol levels and it decreases the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. I mean, honestly, if this was a drug, everyone would be prescribing it, right? And it comes in all the yummiest places like nuts and seeds and avocado and lentils and berries. No one's suffering by eating more fiber. Now, one of the easiest ways to get more fiber is through one of my virgin anti diet loaded smoothies. That is where you take some of my clean protein powders and you add in some berries and veggies and avocado and some nut milk. Totally yummy. And it's super easy to do. So you'll get a little smoothie guy in the links below. Make sure you grab that and start adding a loaded smoothie into your daily routine. And I love to use it as my way to break a fast in the morning. Okay, next step, drink a ton of water between meals. Now, you may believe that you get enough water every day because of all the other stuff you're drinking, but you know what? Coffee and tea and wine, they can actually be dehydrating. And by the time you realize you're thirsty, it is way too late. So what I want you to make sure that you're doing is never getting that point of thirsty. You can be a little hungry, but don't let yourself get thirsty. And you might need to supplement here with with some electrolytes as well, right? Especially if you are doing more fasting. Because when you're dehydrated, just even 1% dehydrated, it's going to raise your stress hormones and it's going to create more inflammation and it makes you hold on to fat. You need water to boost your metabolism. You need water to detoxify, you need water to burn fat and you need water to have great hair, skin and nails. So drink more water. I hope that's clear. And you can make your water fun. You can add a little bit of lemon in there. You can throw in some Chia or extra, my extra fiber blend. That's if you're getting really hungry, just put a little bit of that in there with some lemon juice and that will help you feel fuller, longer and also help control the blood sugar response to your next Meal. Now, one time, I don't go in crazy on your waters when you're drinking, when you're eating your meals because it can impair your digestion. So drink a lot of water in between your meals. Limit your water to 4 to 8 ounces during meals. But the rest of the day, drink on up. All right, now the final. This is a big rule. This is a hard and fast rule. In fact, if I could have like a padlock and an arm guard at the door of the kitchen, I probably would do it. You want to make sure you stop eating at least three to four hours before bed. And no, that does not mean go to bed later. If you ate a late dinner, don't eat a late dinner, close your kitchen and stop eating three to four hours before bed. Okay, deal. Because that 12 hour or more window between dinner and when you break your fast gets your insulin to return to fasting levels. And that means you can access stored body fat for free. Fuel fat burning. Okay, so exercise. You knew I had to talk about exercise here. Now, with exercise, I want to make sure that you work out. But ideally, if you do it first thing in the morning, where you can work out first and then have the breakfast afterwards, do that loaded smoothie afterwards is amazing. It can help you improve your insulin sensitivity and burn more fat, so, so much more. And then all you do is you push that breakfast to brunch. And you know, you could consider this your permission to sleep in. You're welcome. So one of the ways that you can extend this benefit of fast even more, right? Is just sleep in, do a little fast workout, and then have a virgin anti diet load smoothie. All right, bottom line, all these strategies, even the no snow snacking strategy, will actually make you less hungry, not more. So don't panic. And you don't have to eat this way all the time. Well, you do with the 12 hours. Yes, you do, but you don't with the eight hours. You can do that a couple times a week. Remember, we are doing cross training. We're doing caloric variability. We are not doing the same thing all the time. And it's normal to go periods without eating. Think back 10,000 years ago. They did not get up and have three meals and three snacks every single day. Our ancestors did not order woolly mammoths three times a day from doordash. Right. A short eating window and longer not eating window is good for you. It allows your body to fully digest your food so it burns body fat instead of sugar. And bonus, you'll get rid of the gas and bloating, hunger and cravings, and your immune system will actually function better. But best of all, you'll finally connect how food makes you feel and that connecting the dots is so powerful. If you cheat on your fast and you're suddenly cranky and crazed for sweets, or you get bloated, or your eyes are puffy, or you feel mentally sluggish, well, there you go. All right. I hope you jump on the if bandwagon. Actually, come on, start intermittent fasting with me, because you're going to start seeing those benefits, like immediately, overnight, and I promise it's not going to hurt. And don't forget to like and subscribe so you get more healthy weight loss intel tips and tricks. And in the next video, we're going to get back into our series on reasons other than their diet that you can't lose weight. I'll 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 subscribetojay.com thanks again for being.

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