Harmful Habits That Make You Store Body Fat with JJ Virgin

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You don't change your health overnight. You change it over time. And you change it over time by one by one going through habits that are not working for you, identifying them and then changing them. And once you get that one dialed, go on to the next.

Here's JJ Virgin, Triple board certified nutrition.

And fitness expert and four time New York Times best selling author.

It's time to reignite wellness.

Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And today we're going to be talking about the nine habits that can make you store fat. Obviously these are habits that you are going to want to break now on the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show season two. Finally, we do three different things. We have a guest interview every week. We have a solo episode every week with me. And then we also do Friday Q and A. If you are watching this live right now on Instagram @jj virgin or on Facebook @jj virgin official and you have a question that you would like me to address, make sure that you post it in and I will be throwing those into the Friday Q and A. So we are going to talk today about the nine habits that could make you store fat. And we will put some really cool show notes@jjvirgin.com storefat and I'm giving you these habits so you won't be doing this. Because I can think back to those times where I was so, so, so frustrated because I kept cutting my calories, I kept trying the latest diet and and I was just exercising like a fiend. In fact, this was 30 plus years ago so it should have been a lot easier then, right? And I was literally like counting every calorie, eating super low fat. Remember those days? Eating vegetarian super low fat, counting every calorie, seeing how low I could go. And then on the flip side of that, I was exercising like crazy at the time. I was a personal trainer. I was working out with clients all day long than I take them walking and running. I was getting loads and loads of exercise way more than I do now and eating way less than I do now. But somehow My body fat back then was 25%. At the height was averaging between 22 and 25%, which, okay, is fine on the healthy side, but not for someone who's in their early 20s, working out and supposedly eating healthy. Now I sit around 15% body fat. I work out, you know, 20 to 40 minutes a day. And I do not go and count all these things because as we know, our body isn't a bank account, right? It's a chemistry lab and weight is a hormonal issue. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. What are those habits that you might be doing that are actually making you store fat, not burn it? I'm pretty sure that's not our optimal goal here. So I'm going to dive into that in a moment. First, I wanted to do a shout out. And again, this is the JJ Virgin lifestyle show. And I wanted to do a shout out to this screen name. It keeps getting better. And it was a Apple 5 star review on itunes says thank you. I recently discovered this podcast. I appreciate the breadth of knowledge and holistic approach to health and wellness. Succinctly delivered. I'm hooked. All right, I super appreciate that. And again, if you have not popped over and subscribed yet, subscribe to JJ.com super easy to do. Subscribe to JJ.com thank you team for putting that together for me. While you're there, leave a review. It helps a ton because we do this as a labor of love, literally. And it takes a village to get this information out to you each and every week so that you can have great information that you can put into immediate use. And remember, at the end of this podc, I'm gonna give you your marching orders for what you can do today. If you're watching me live right now on my social media channels. Cause I like to record mine live. Put the questions you have on in there and at the end I will be addressing them. And then we can also use them for our Friday Q and A segment. So again, this is why you wanna subscribe so you never miss any of the goodness. Now, before I jump in, here's another one of my favorites.

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Welcome back. We are going to be talking today about the nine habits that store fat in the body so that we don't do them anymore. These are habits you want to break. I'm big on setting up the right habits in your body because here's the deal. You don't change your health overnight. You change it over time. And you change it over time by one by one going through habits that are not working for you, identifying them and then changing them. And once you get that one dialed, go on to the next. So love to see everybody on social kind of guessing what they think these habits are. So put them on into the comments. What habits do you think that are causing people to store fat, not burn it? Here's the first one. And like this is so key, critical and in fact super big deal. I remember hearing that you could be doing everything right. You could be eating correctly, you could be exercising. But if you are not getting your eight to nine hours of sleep every single night, guess what? You're going to struggle with your weight. Here is why. When you do not sleep well, you are more insulin resistant. More insulin resistant all day long. If you're more insulin resistant, you're going to have be storing fat, not burning it. You also have elevated ghrelin all through the night, and elevated ghrelin makes you hungrier. And you know this to be true. Like, I know when I don't get a good night's sleep, I'm like, hungrier all day the next day. And I'll tell you a little thing that happened last night. Last night I did not set the alarm because my first call started at 9. I'm like, I went to bed at 10. So I was like, no biggie. I'll be fine. And because my preferred way of doing this is going to bed during the normal circadian rhythm, do not stay up late. And having stopped eating at least three to four hours before bed and then getting a good night's sleep and waking up without an alarm. And, and here's the deal. I wear a little aura ring right here too to track all this. So which gives you a sleep score and a readiness score, store score. So it absolutely blew my mind last night when 9am I woke up because the phone was buzzing and I'm like, what the heck was that? Like, I slept a crazy amount of sleep last night. Got a 93 readiness score. Yay. So. So that's not typical. Normally I'll sleep eight to nine hours every single night. But I guess I needed it so super important for you to get your sleep. And one of the things that I like to do, because you'll find out what that is for you. And again, it's not just how long. It's quality. In fact, the more important thing is quality. You might be in bed from 10 to 7, but if you toss and turn all night, you aren't going to get that great sleep score. So super important to track your sleep. We'll put into the show notes what I use, which is an aura ring. And again, you can get those show notes if you're watching us live right now. Can't get the show yet notes yet. You'll get them when we we drop this podcast at the JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show. But the show notes will be@jjvirgin.com storefat which I, I think that's probably the wrong one to have used, but you know what I mean. We're going to help you not store fat here. And so sleep was the first one. And I saw some people on our social media channels going, poor sleep, poor sleep. So love that. Thank you. Robin has been around for a long time, so she knows how I feel about these things. And thanks you nailed it too. Next one up, chronic stress. And if you've been around my world, you know that seven years ago, little like we're coming right up on that. Oh no, we passed the anniversary. Yes, I remember the anniversary well, September 10th, my son Grant was hit by a car, victim of a hit and run, left for dead in the street. And literally we were in the hospital with them for four and a half months. It's taken over five years to really pull him to a place of any kind of normalcy. And now he's doing better. And I would say in many ways 110%, which was my goal for him. But talk about chronic stress and what happens with chronic stress. Because it's not the short term stress of our ancestors where like an animal either ate you or didn't. It is the chronic stress of us overworking under sleeping, poor diet, over exercise. And what that does to you over time is it actually will raise your blood sugar which makes your body store more fat around your belly. Around your belly. Oh my gosh. The like pace people people always complain about. So it causes you to store more fat, it causes you to have poor sleep because it's going to lower serotonin, make you store more fat and crave more sugar. Come on, how unfair is that? Also makes your gut leakier because one of the big reasons we get leaky gut, which is what I wrote the virgin diet about, is because of stress. Stress makes your gut more permeable, super duper important. So chronic stress is huge. Okay, but what the heck do you do about it? If you say are in a job with bad work hours or a mean boss or you know, or maybe you're self employed and you have a mean boss. Hello. What do you do about these things? So obviously you want to look at what you can shift, but I find the biggest source of stress is our perception of it. And so there are things that you can do there like and we'll put them into the show notes. We have my gratitude, appreciation, miracles, little five minute exercise that you can do each day. Tapping we'll put in there and meditation through Ziva meditation. So shout out to Nick Ortner tapping solution. All those Ortner's, love them all. And then of course to Emily Fletcher of Ziva Meditation. It's really about finding the thing that works best for you in terms of stress. And we'll also link into my podcast that I did about stress because it could be its whole thing again. We're talking nine habits that can make you store fat today so we did. Poor sleep, chronic stress, too much fructose. And no, I'm not talking about, like, you had some berries in the morning. I am talking about you are using agave as your sweetener of choice. Yikes. You're using crystalline fructose. You're doing dried fruit, fruit juice. Dried fruit to me is candy, fruit, syrup. Fruit is syrup. Fruit juice is a soda. You're using those things which are giving your body too big of a hit of fructose. It's unwrapped. It's not just within the fruit. With also great plant nutrients and fiber, you unwrapped it, hit your body hard, and here's what happens. The only organ that can metabolize fructose is your liver. So it goes beeline. And for the liver, where if there's not enough space for it to be converted to glucose and stored as glycogen, the storage energy, it's turned into fat. And guess what? There's not a lot of space in the liver, which is why we are getting things like fatty liver in kids. Because if it can't be stored as. As energy, it's going to be turned into fat, and then you're getting all sorts of problems. So fructose is a huge one. Sugar Impact Diet was written to help identify where this is, sneaking in what you can do in place of it, and really understand how many. How much sugar and how many carbs you should be eating based on you. Because it's all different, right? We all have our own personal chemistry labs. That's why we all need to be our own personal health detective and figure out what works for us. Super duper important. All right, next one. And again, each of these ones could be their own podcast, obviously their own live on Instagram or Facebook. So again, I'm hitting the nine right now. The next one, number four, is endurance exercise. Now, this might sound crazy to you, and again, I started off this podcast talking about how I used to do a lot of cardio and a lot of endurance training. I remember for my 30th birthday, I went and played. I went and ran the 4th street stairs at Santa Monica. I went to, then played beach volleyball, which, of course, is not endurance training, it's burst training. But I didn't do a whole lot of that. Then I went and did hours of inline skating, rollerblading. So that's the kind of stuff that I used to do tons and tons. And what happens with endurance training is it can actually raise stress hormones, break down muscle mass, creates a lot of oxidative stress on the body makes you hungrier. And that stress, of course, can break down with breaking down muscle lowers your metabolism, so you become dependent on the exercise to burn calories. But your body then starts to downregulate because it goes, okay, we got to hold on. So whenever you're cutting calories and increasing exercise, over time, your body starts to calibrate so that you don't have that elevated metabolism. And so really watch the endurance exercise because, again, raising stress hormones, breaking down muscle, and making you hungrier are a bad trifecta for putting on fat. So what we do instead, and we'll put this in the show notes, is we call it burst to blast fat, we do high intensity interval training. My favorite way to do that is something called the exciser. So we'll do a little thing in there so you can see exactly what I'm talking about. All right, next one. Snacking. Oh, my gosh. And back then, when I was doing all of that, I was eating low fat and eating all throughout the day because we were taught that you should be grazing. Well, snacking is the absolute worst thing that you want to do. In fact, one of the things that we now know is it's not just what you eat, it's when you eat and that we have to look at. First step is shrinking your eating window. The first thing I have people do is go from, you know, not paying attention to paying attention to when they eat. Stop eating three to four hours before bed and make your overnight window fasting window at least 12 hours. Once we've got that one dialed, then we can start to take it to 14, and then we can flip in some days of intermittent fasting of, like, say, eight hours. Big first goal, though, is to stop the snacking. Why? Because when you eat, you raise blood sugar. When you raise blood sugar, you raise insulin. Blood sugar goes fast, insulin goes slow. If you're eating all throughout the day, your insulin never has a chance to come back to fasting levels where it needs to be in order for your body to burnout stored fat for fuel. And so that means you've got elevated insulin, which is, by the way, inflammatory, but also shutting the doors to the fat cells so you can't burn stored fat for fuel. I don't know about you, but I want to burn stored fat for fuel. That's what I want to be using. So it's make you. It makes you, even though you're eating, hungry all the time. So we got to reverse you out of that and Again, one of the ways that I teach people to do that is eat by the trifecta, a protein, fat and fiber, because it helps keep your blood sugar stable, which is everything, and will help you go longer between meals. Slightest bit of hunger, what are you going to do? You're going to drink some water because quite often we're not hungry, we're thirsty. And if your water is decreased, you actually raise stress hormones. If you're drinking enough water, it boosts your metabolism. There you go, boom. All right, next one. Drinking alcohol. Sadly enough alcohol sidelines fat burning. And so the reason is it can also it stimulates appetite to make you eat more. Now, I'm not saying you can't drink, but I'm saying be careful what you do drink. We'll be do a link in here to dry farm wines. That's the wine, my wine of choice. But watch how much you're drinking because it can make you hungrier and not necessarily when you're drinking it, it actually can make you hungrier the next day. And that's the problem. It can interfere with your sleep as well as we know. So that's what I want you to pay attention to. All right, next up, eating late at night. I already said I want you to stop eating three to four hours before bed. So when you eat before bed, what you do is you suppress ghrelin, which suppresses growth hormone response. Remember, when we're eat, we're sleeping, we're healing. And also if you eat before bed, it can trigger gerd. So that is a problem as well. So which is reflux or heartburn. So what we want to do is at the minimum, stop eating three hours before bed. There's some really cool research coming out now that showing the more you can eat, the, the earlier you can eat that last meal, the better. Like I think in our perfect world, we'd wake up in the morning, we'd have either some black bulletproof coffee, we'd have some green tea, we'd have some hot water with lemon and you would hydrate as well, drinking just some pure water until you start to really notice that you're hungry. Not I'm just a little bit, but I'm hungry. Could be an hour, could be two hours, could be three hours before you may need to eat. Then you have your breakfast, which might be a breakfast, lunch, brunchy thing, and then drink a lot of fluids in between and then eat your other meal or two. But ideally on a couple days a week, you're getting that eight hour window and Then maybe some of the other days you're getting a little bit later. But I'd love to see us all starting to shift our dinner down to probably where people are having that afternoon snack and dump the afternoon snack altogether. All right. And I see John saying, I try not to eat after it gets dark. Which is a great one to do in the winter. In the summer, of course, we gotta shift that one. And remember, in the summer with the longer days, we actually, um, don't sleep as much. We're more insulin resistant and better at storing fat. Yikes. We don't want to be better at storing fat. All right, now, eating foods that you're intolerant to. This is what I wrote the Virgin Diet about. We will actually put in a link to the show notes jjvirgin.com forward/storefat. We're going to put a link into my free seven day challenge. If you're watching this live right now and if someone can put put this into the notes on Facebook and Instagram for me, it's JJVirgin.com JJ Challenge takes you into my free seven day challenge to help you identify which foods work for you and which foods don't. I wrote the Virgin Diet about food intolerance because what I started to discover was when I was putting people on, when I was doing food sensitivity testing and pulling out the foods that weren't working for them, they started to effortlessly, automatically pretty much lose weight. Because these foods that you're eating, even if they're healthy foods, they may not be healthy for you. Often these are things like dairy and gluten and eggs and soy. And if you're eating them, they aren't working for you. They trigger an inflammatory response. They also make you crave the very foods that are hurting you. They can make you have gas and bloating and belly fat, all sorts of things. So it's one of the first places that I like to go in my, in my journey of getting you healthy, of going through that diet journey. The first step is to commit second step is to improve the quality of the food you're eating and then start to work on the timing the food and then figure out your food and tolerance. So key super important here, once you've done that, the next thing that I want you to look at is sugar. And you knew that if you were watching this, that I was going to get into sugar at some point. And beyond just fructose high sugar impact foods. These are foods that are high in, in, they're heavily processed, they're High in either sugars or starchy carbs, but not the good starchy carbs like resistant starch. They are low in fiber or have no fiber. So any of these types of foods will raise blood sugar and raise insulin and again put you into fat storing instead of fat burning. So wrote the Sugar Impact diet about this. I looked at foods and I rated them based on sugar impact, based on do they have fiber and lots of nutrients? That's good. Are they loaded? Do they create a big insulin response or a lot of fructose? That's bad. So I'm getting people saying, okay, what about honey? Nope, honey, not okay. It's actually higher in fructose. It's straight sugar. That's all it is. If you're using that as a homeopathic for allergies during an allergy time of year, it's raw, natural, local, and it's half a teaspoon or so. So would not be one of my choices. Sugar impact, again, we go through what you can use, what can you use if you want to naturally sweeten? But my goal is always there to help you get rid of that sweet tooth, to not play along with that sweet tooth. And what I proved in the Sugar Impact Diet when I took the first 600 people through it is that you can get rid of your sweet tooth in two weeks or less. Yes, you can. All right, we'll put the links in the show. Note to that as well. Now, when I come back, I'm going to give you your marching orders, what you need to do right now so that you get the results that you want. So you just got nine different habits. I want to break it down so you know exactly how to get started. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. Okay, so this is when I take all of that information and give you where to start so you can put this into immediate action. Because having all this great information and doing nothing with it is not useful. Right. So let's make sure first that you get the show notes jjvirgin.com storefat because what I want you to do is I want you to go through and I'm going to read them again right now. The nine habits that can make you store fat rather than burn it. And they are poor sleep, chronic stress, too much fructose, endurance exercise. And that would be like, you know, too much endurance exercise. I'm not talking about 30 minutes snacking, drinking alcohol, late night eating, highly reactive foods, foods you're intolerant to, high sugar impact foods and drinks. What I want you to do is go through that list and I want you to prioritize. You may be able to find out that you can check. Off you go, oh, you know what, I'm doing great on sleep and I'm just. My exercise is birth style training and resistance training and I don't eat at night. Cool. Let's go through and check off the ones that you're already good on. Now if you're not good on any of them, do not beat yourself up. What an amazing opportunity. Yay you. You're going to have incredible results. But we're going to start with one. Start with one. And I'd love you to start with one that you go, you know what, I can have quick win on that. I can totally stop the snacking or I will shift my endurance exercise to burst style training. So whichever one you think you can have a quick win on, let's go there first and get that one under your belt so that you go. All right, won that one. What's up next? Okay, so your goal is to get all of these ones dialed in. But again, figure out right now which ones are the the issues for you, which ones you can cross off the list. You already got them nailed. And then prioritize. Start with one. That's an easy a gimme so that you win and then we'll go from there. Okie dokie. Again, grab the show notes jjvirgin.com storefat and then I want to make sure if you have not subscribed yet, I love shouting you out on the show. So go over to subscribetojay.com and subscribe. And while you're there, leave a review and I will shout you out. Put your name in there so I know what it is because I'm always get these funky screen names. I don't know who the heck it is. And I super appreciate all you guys for being with me who've been watching on Facebook and Instagram. Again, you can watch me at JJ Virgin Official on Facebook and JJ Virgin on Instagram. Alrighty, I'll see you next week.