How to Speed Up Your Metabolism Safely with JJ Virgin

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Hey, JJ here and welcome to the podcast. Today we are going to be talking about metabolism. One of the questions I get asked all the time is how do I speed up my metabolism? It's so slow. Well, the first thing we're going to talk about today is is it really slow? How do you know? And then what are some simple things that you can do to help boost your metabolism safely? Because there are of course, some ways to do it that are not okay with some different kinds of stimulants. We're not talking about that. We're going to talk about some things that you can do to get your metabolism humming. So that weight loss is excellent, effortless. Sound good? Well, I'm going to be talking about that today. I'm the special guest and I want to remind you that we do awesome cheat sheets for our shows and you can pick up the cheat sheet for Today's show@jjvirgin.com metabolism hey, welcome back, it's JJ. I'm super excited to be talking about this topic again. It comes up all the time and the first thing I want to do once we talk about metabolism is kind of go through this whole idea of a slow metabolism because I've been working in weight loss for 30 years. And I will tell you that the reality is I don't see metabolisms that are really that slow. I see us doing things that get in the way of us losing weight or can even cause us to gain weight or not, addressing metabolic problems that can result in a little bit of a slow metabolism. So let's go through what could be slowing things down for you or get in the way of you losing weight. And a couple of these things that will do this. Number one, super critical is thyroid function. You've got to have optimal thyroid function in order to have a great metabolism. And I say optimal and you can tell I kind of said that pretty exaggerated because what you get when you get a typical lab test is the range for thyroid function for the average person. Well, the Average person is not healthy. They don't have a great metabolism. So you don't want to get into the normal lab ranges. You want to go ideal. So when you're looking at thyroid, you're going to need to look at TSH along with free T3 and T4 and thyroid antibodies. You don't want your thyroid antibodies elevated at all. If you go to a doctor and they tell you they're going to watch them because they're elevated, this is a problem, okay? Because that is starting to damage your thyroid. We do not want that to happen. So you want to have an optimal thyroid function. And the best way to do that is to get those labs done. Work with functional medicine doctor if things aren't where they need to be, which is having your TSH around 0.5 to 1, probably right around 1, and also teaming that with symptoms, because symptoms of low thyroid constipation, elevated cholesterol, depression, anxiety, hair, falling out cold, can't lose weight, amongst others, are also super important. When you're looking at this, don't look at in isolation. Now, the next thing, and this goes hand in hand with thyroid, is our adrenal issues. And adrenal exhaustion can really impair your metabolism. I like to do something called an adrenal salivary index. It's a saliva test where you can look at your cortisol, the number one hormone pumped out by the adrenal glands throughout the day. And then you also compare that ratio to dhea. So you look at cortisol throughout the day to establish a rhythm and make sure that your, your adrenal glands are working optimally, they're not overworking or fatigued. And then you also see how they are working in relationship to the other adrenal hormone here, dhea super critical, because quite often as you're starting to go to adrenal exhaustion, you start to lower your dhea, which is needed for good testosterone and good fat burning. Now, another thing that can do this are different medications, especially a lot of the different psych medications can really impair metabolism, they can elevate blood sugar, they can make you more insulin resistant. So some of these things are necessary. But this is where you want to work with your functional medicine, doctor. Optimize your gut microbiome, optimize your diet, your lifestyle, your supplements so that you can use the least amount of medications necessary and also offset any of those side effects with supplements. Okay, this is where we start to get into things I'm going to help you with today. And yes, there's going to be some genetics where you might just have the propensity to, to regain weight or difficulty losing weight. But quite often I see with people, it's interesting if you look now at the statistics, 70% of the US population is overweight or obese. More obese now than overweight, which has never been before. 40% obese. Of the other 30%, they're not okay. Half of those people are something called skinny fat. That means fat inside, thin outside. And skinny fat is where you will have a sluggish metabolism. Because the simplest way to change your metabolism quickly is by changing your body composition. When you have more muscle mass, it requires more energy to exist on your body. It's very active tissue. When you work out super hard and you have to recover, your body has to work harder to deal with that. And you've got muscle protein resynthesis. That's a very metabolically costly event. So you want to make sure that you are not skinny fat. And that is why it's super important not just to look at your weight, but also to look at your body composition. Get yourself a good body fat scale. In the show notes, I'll list some of my favorites. Get yourself a body fat scale so you'll be able to see how much your body is fat and how much of your body is lean mass. And again, you want to have an ideal proportion. For men that's going to be somewhere in the 8 to 15% range and for women somewhere in the 18 to 20 to 25% the most. But honestly, I like to see more in, let's say 15 to 22%. I'm going leaner than you're going to hear out there. But here's a little secret. Back when I was in graduate school, gazillion years ago, those were the numbers that we were given. And what I've seen over the years is that we keep making it more and more okay to have higher body fat. I don't get that. That's not, that's ridiculous. Because what we know is that the higher your body fat, the higher your risk of certain cancers, the higher your risk of insulin resistance and diabetes. So it doesn't make any sense. This is not a benign tissue, as we know. So test your body fat. Now, I'm going to give you three things that you can do to help start to get a better metabolic rate right now. However, I'm going to also tell you that I created an entire program, really comprehensive program with Mind Body Green over the fall. Super fun team to work with and we will have in the show notes how you can check that out because obviously this is a short podcast and that is a comprehensive, full blown, amazing program. So if this is striking a nerve and you're going, gosh, I really need to start to do this, I'm going to give you stuff to get started with right now, but then also guide you to how you can learn more. Now, the first thing I want you to do is really dial in your diet. I have found over and over again. And if you know about my history as a personal trainer, I saw pretty quickly that you couldn't exercise yourself out of a poor diet and that if you want to change your health, depending on the place to start, first is by dialing in your diet, by changing what's at the end of your fork. So let me give you a couple things that can help support a better metabolism. The first one is making sure that you have some protein at each meal. Now, if you've been around my campus for a while, you know I tell people to eat by the plate and that is getting clean, lean protein, healthy fats and fiber at each meal. Meal because it gets you really great blood sugar balance proteins, very thermic. It will help boost your metabolism so little protein for optimal protein levels at each meal. And speaking of meals, the other thing that I talk about is eating by the clock. Now, one of the key things you can do to help your metabolism is to have a good overnight fast, somewhere between 12 and up to 16 hours. But for most of us it'll probably be more like 12 to 14 hours. That's where you start to get that intermittent fasting pulling in. And why that's so important is when you do that, you lower, you keep your insulin low. And when your insulin is low, your body can access stored fat for fuel. You start to push out some ketones, which are really good fuel source for your brain. And it makes it easier for you to use your stored fat for fuel. Which is, I'm assuming, what you probably want to do. I know I do. I don't want to burn off a cookie. I want to burn off belly fat. Now, two other critical things here are lowering your sugar impact. One of the simplest ways to start to just drop body fat and feel better is to lower your sugar impact. The other one is to uncover your hidden food intolerances. And I've recorded a podcast on this as well. We'll put it in the show notes. This is because if you are eating foods that don't work for you or you have A higher sugar impact diet, you're going to have more inflammation. Inflammation is its own risk factor for obesity, but it can also start to mess up all everything else going on with you and especially with food intolerance. If you do have some issues with thyroid, thyroid poor thyroid function, quite often it is autoimmune related and just by fixing, getting the gluten gone and some of the other things like soy and corn, this can start to get those antibodies to come back down again, which is what you want. So super important there. Next we I already hinted at this, so I'm going to go full blown here is to really work on your exercise. So step one is dialing in your diet. Eating by the plate, eating by the clock. It's not just what you eat, it's also when you eat it. I recorded a whole podcast on this and I want you to tune into that as well because eating late at night is a problem. Next one of course is adding in the exercise. Now you know I just said, hey, the most important thing is dialing in your diet. But what we know about exercise is that if you're trying to maintain your weight by diet alone, most likely you're a tofi thin outside fat in the inside. Don't want that. That's that skinny fat I just talked about. And here's what we know. Exercise can be amazing for boosting your metabolism. When you do it right, what's not going to boost your exercise? Your metabolism is going for a long walk. I want you to do that. We all, you know, we need to move more. But in order for you to really do the kick to your metabolism, you want to do exercise. And exercise in order for it to count needs to be hot, you need to get hot and sweaty. It should hurt a bit, but the good news is that you don't have to do it for long. So the two types of exercise I look here to do the best for your metabolism. The first one is high intensity interval training or burst training. You'll see me talk about bursting to blast fat and we'll put that in the show notes. That is where you go all out for 30 to 60 seconds. And this could be doing Turkish get ups, burpees, jumping jacks, jumping rope, running up stairs, jumping up and down in a pool, dancing, standing up on a bike and cycling. So all out for 30 to 60 seconds and then you are going to recover for twice as long. And when you think of recovering for twice as much long, what I want you to do is something super active. So you hit it hard. And then let's say that you sprinted and then you walked it off for a minute. You sprinted for 30 seconds. You walked it off for a minute. So you should feel like you're getting out of breath during that 30 to 60 seconds. Don't pace yourself. Go all out. And then you're recovering to help buffer the lactic acid back down. The cool thing about this is when you do this and you accumulate four to eight total minutes of bursting, your body isn't done. When you're done, it now has to recover because you've created this deficit, this oxygen deficit. And it's got to pay back that debt. And it does that by getting your metabolism cranking for it. Depends on how much you did and how hard it was, but generally an hour or two or so afterwards. In fact, some of the research has shown this could be up as much as 24 hours afterwards. Now, the other thing that you can do to boost your metabolism all day long is to have more muscle mass. And the key way to do that is through good resistance training. And in my Fat My Fast Fitness program, I have you doing both burst training and resistance training, because I want you to hold on to or build lean muscle mass as you're dropping fat. And it's key and critical to have that muscle mass on your body because that means you're going to be burning more calories all day long. That muscle is metabolically active. It sits there and hungry for calories. So the other cool thing about resistance training that it does for your metabolism, it's one of the first places you can start to improve insulin sensitivity. And when you're more insulin sensitive, your insulin will be lower. And if your insulin is lower, then you can burn off fat easier. So it's a two for one right there. Love that. Then let me give you a couple things that you can do that can help boost your metabolism. First off, I'll put in the show notes my product Metabolic Charge. And this is a very interesting cool product because it's not stimulating, has a specific fraction of a bitter orange extract. Most bitter orange is very stimulating, can raise blood pressure, et cetera. Not this one it doesn't. So it's not stimulating, won't do that, but it does boost your metabolism, especially in the combination that we put it with some other nutrients. So there's that next one is coffee. And coffee keeps adrenaline around, which will help you break down fat. Now, you don't want to do too much. You'll trash your adrenals. But coffee, especially if you're doing mycotoxin free coffee. We'll put the bulletproof information in the show. Notes can be really amazing because of the antioxidants in it. You've got the metabolic effect and the antioxidants. Now, the thing that will trash your metabolism is alcohol. Sadly enough, if you are going to drink, we will put a little link for dry farm wines. But for alcohol, what is super critical here is that if you are trying to have a better metabolism, if you're trying to lose fat, this alcohol is not your friend. Here's why your body, when you drink alcohol, says, wow, I've got to focus on this first. So preferentially, you start to metabolize alcohol over everything else. What happens is you get some rebound insulin resistance, and in the next couple days, you're hungrier and you're better at storing fat, which just stinks. So you see that there's a reason for people for that term beer belly. But you do see it when people are drinking more is they tend to have a little higher body fat, they're a little hungrier, and they're storing more fat around their waist. All right, what can you drink then? Since I just was a total buzzkill, water. And you know, it's interesting, I did a segment on Dr. Oz where I showed that water can boost your metabolism as much as 30%. You could burn 300 more calories throughout the day just by drinking water. Now, I'm going to take a step further and say, let's drink some water and let's drink some ice green tea. I'm a big fan of ice green tea. I drink about 32 ounces of it a day. Because it is, besides the fact that there's an ingredient in green tea called egcg, and this ingredient can boost your metabolism, improve insulin sensitivity. And then it's also got theanine, which is very calming, and it's got some great antioxidants in it. So green tea can help boost your metabolism. Water can help boost your metabolism. And it's interesting. Even if you're mildly dehydrated, I'm talking 1 to 2%, something you've never even noticed. It can raise your stress hormones. And that, again, is the exact opposite of what you want to do when you're trying to support good metabolic function. All right, what's one more thing? One more thing that you can add, and I always love to look at, what can we add to our life to make things to make our metabolism work better? Well, one thing are spices. And in fact, we know that when you're using cayenne pepper, red pepper, any of the spicy chilies and peppers, that those actually boost your metabolism as well. So I'm going to give you one that you probably never thought about that you can do, and it is to put a little bit of cayenne pepper in your morning smoothie. Now, that might sound absolutely disgusting. You're like, what, jj, you crazy? But chocolate with the little cayenne, this little, like zippy dark chocolate with cayenne actually is super yummy. So I'm going to throw that out there. Have you tried it out? And we'll put a little link to a recipe for that in the show notes too. But it sounds kind of gross. I know, but it's actually really, really yummy. But look at where you can throw some of these things, spices in throughout the day because they absolutely help. And along with those, one other shout out is to coconut oil. Now, I use coconut milk in my smoothie. I make coconut whipped cream. I use coconut oil for baking. Look at where you can use coconut oil. Because the medium chain triglycerides are very easy to burn, but they're also thermic. They can help boost your metabolism a bit as well. And I love the fact that there's things that, like so we can add to our diet that can help boost our metabolism and just add to the deliciousness too. Isn't that awesome? All right, I mentioned it a couple times. We will be putting in the show notes. Lots of cool resources. So make sure that you check out the show notes@jjvirgin.com metabolism jjvirgin.com metabolism I'll also put a link to the course that I just did with Mind Body Green, which I'm super excited about. How to supercharge your metabolism. There are so many things that you can incorporate into your daily life. Again, my biggest goal is that these are things that you do that you just turn into habits. In fact, what I prefer is, and this is how I'm operating this year, is I am taking one by one things that I want to make sure that I'm doing. Because here's the deal. You're never done getting healthy. So this idea, okay, I'm done. Nope, never done. There's always going to be something to work on to improve. And what I found works the best for me because we don't change. We don't make this 180 degree change that sticks. What's easier is if you go, all right, I'm going to do this 10 degree change. And then once that one's totally dialed in as a habit, that could take a week. Could take three weeks. I know it says it takes 21 days. I'm not sure if that's an urban legend or not. But once that one's dialed, then add the next one in and keep doing that until you've hit the 180 degree change little by little. Remember, it's the little hinges that swing the big doors. Alrighty. Thank you so much for tuning in for this one. Now, after the break, I'll be answering a listener's questions, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question comes from Joe in Denver. And Joe. And this looks like Joe. Joe, Female Joe. Joe says, jj, I'm working out now at my house, but I don't have much in the way of equipment. Is it just as good to do bodyweight exercises or do I need to use weights? Okay, this question I actually get asked a lot, but I kind of get asked another one, which is how much weight should I use? And truthfully, it doesn't matter whether it's weights, whether it's trx, whether it's body weight. It's really the heaviest weight you can can handle in good form for 8 to 12 repetitions with about a 60 second rest break in between multiple sets. So here's my biggest thing with this is body weight can be amazingly effective because you end up having to pull your core in as well. The big thing you want to do is make sure that you're hitting all of the major body parts. I divided them into upper body pushing. That's your chest, shoulders and triceps, upper body pulling, and that is your back, shoulders and biceps and lats, hips and thighs. And power core is make sure you're hitting each body part at least twice a week and that you are exhausting them. You're doing multiple sets, 8 to 12 reps. I might do those Sometimes I'll do it in terms of time and I'll do something for about 30 seconds. So you want to do what you can handle for that amount of time. If it's too easy, you need to increase the resistance. If it's too hard, you need to lower it. So when you're using body weight, you can change your angles. So if you're doing a push up and it's too hard on the ground, you could do it against a bench or against a wall. You can add some instability by doing it with your feet on a ball. I always feel like I'm Dr. Seuss right now with all the rhyming. But the bottom line is, doesn't matter if it's weights, bands, body weight, it's what can you do to fatigue yourself in 8 to 12 repetitions or depending on the timing, about 30 seconds of time, 20 to 30 seconds of time. And then to do multiple sets and to shake this up as much as possible, we adapt. The whole thing with exercise is exercise should be quite progressive. Progressive. It should never really get easier. You just start making it harder and you adapt. That's what you do with exercise. You got to keep changing it up, you know, don't get lazy with it. I catch myself doing this all the time. I'm like doing the same things. One of the things that's so great about traveling all the time is that you're forced to change things up. One day I might be running up and down hotel stairs. The next day I might be using a gym. The next day I might be doing a workout in my hotel room. I'm always changing up because I'm sort of forced to do it. And I go to a gym near my house here in Rancho Santa Fe, but I also have a gym in the house. And then I also have like a ridiculous backyard with an orchard and stuff that really, when I moved in here, I'm like, I'm going to be doing all these amazing workouts. And so this, this year I'm going to. Oh my gosh. See, we all have these things always, always gotta be improving, right? So hope that answered the question in that you can, you can do body weight, you can do free weights, you can do trx, you can do bands. Just do what you can do and make sure it's hard. And remember, intensity rules here. By the way. I've got my fast fitness program and we do have some of the different exercise programs that you can do at home with no equipment. So. And we also have them, of course, with minimal equipment, free weights, exerciser and a ball, which honestly, if you have that stuff, you are golden. You've got like what you need to kick it. Add a couple exercise bands and you're dialed. All right, thank you so much, Joe. Now this is the gratitude portion of the show where I highlight the review of the week. And this week's review is from POD Aficionado man from the USA said. Oh, just subscribed. Okay, just subbed and look forward to the next episode already. Virgin Diet Lifestyle show is definitely a hidden gem here on itunes. So I was looking at this one because generally we go through and we cross them off after we read them and somehow this was way down on the list and I'd never seen it before because we used to call this the Virgin Diet Lifestyle Show. Now it's the JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show. And this was back from 2014 because I was like a hidden gem. So thank you so much from POD Aficionado man. And hopefully it's not a hidden gem anymore. And you know what? If you could help me make it not a hidden gem. I don't want to be the best kept secret secret Share this with your friends. When you pop over to itunes to subscribe, make sure you share it with your friends. And also if you could leave a review, oh my gosh, it helps us so much because you know, we all check these things out and go, well, who else is saying something? So I super appreciate the review and I super appreciate you tuning in. So thank you so much. See you next time.

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. What should I read next podcast.com to find out more.