How to Stop Dieting as a Hobby

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Foreign. 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, I did put on my makeup and do my hair, so check it out on my YouTube channel.

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Hey there, it's JJ. Now let's start off by playing a word association game. When I say this word, tune in to how it makes you feel. All right, ready? Here we go. Diet. Did you seize up? Did you feel yourself start to fight something invisible? Want to raid the fridge? All of those things come up because we've all had the same experience. At some point when you're on a diet, starving and obsessed with what you can't have, right? But we all want results. So how can you square that circle? Well, it's simple. Stop dieting as a hobby. Stop dieting as a hobby. And I'm going to give you seven strategies that are going to show you how. Thanks for being with me. Now on this channel, I share a lot of the latest information about ways to get healthy fitness, feel better and lose weight. So hit like and subscribe to. Join me if you want more of that. So let's talk dieting. If you're human, odds are you've been on a diet and it probably went something like this. Obsessing over the food, feeling deprived, trying to fight it, crazy binging, and then hating yourself for it. Am I right? It sucks. It's exhausting and it's depressing. The happy news is there's a better way. A way to get the results without beating yourself up like that. Now, when you learn to use diets as a therapeutic tool instead of dieting as a lifelong hobby, you'll get the results you want without all the suffering. Suffering is not a requirement. This isn't the Handmaid's Tale. This can actually be fun, especially when you start to see results. The success comes when you focus on things that heal your metabolism because that's what's going to trigger fat loss. And you know from some of my other videos, I'm about getting healthy to lose weight, not vice versa. If you build it, they will come. And if you get healthy, the weight will fall off. Now, if that sounds easy, it's because it really can be. If you're not trapped on some bad diet carnival ride. If you're not getting the results you want from constantly dieting, the answer is not to diet harder. It's to diet smarter by using them for what they're meant to be. Again, a short term therapeutic tool research shows that depriving yourself just makes you want to eat more. And if you do that for long enough, dieting can backfire and trigger your body's survival mechanism, which slows down your metabolism and makes it easier, even harder, to lose weight. So let's talk about how to make some changes that'll help you stop dieting as a hobby and change your relationship with food forever. Number one, focus on one new habit at a time. You know when you get overwhelmed, when you try to do too much, you're paralyzed. It's actually called analysis paralysis. So set yourself up for success by chipping away at your big goal. Part of it is mindset. And mindset is super important as the big piece for breaking the cycle. So choose one small habit to change. Maybe it's going for a walk after breakfast. Maybe it's slowing down and tuning into true hunger signals. Maybe it's cutting out, snacking after dinner. Whatever it is, make a plan. Then follow it up by doing two things. Number one, publicly commit to it by telling your family, your friends, right? Get it out there, say you're in. And then two, track it for a month. A month? Yes, a whole month. Now, chances are really good that it will be a new habit before then, and then it's just automatic. Baby changes are super easy to make, and over time, those baby changes, they can add up to big results. I like to say those little hinges, they all swing the big doors. So focusing on less can actually help you achieve much, much more. Now, number two, you're going to figure out your hidden food intolerances. If you've been having trouble getting healthy and losing weight and you keep dieting over and over and over and over and over and over again hoping for a different result, first of all, you know what that's the definition of? Yup. That is the definition of insanity. But more importantly, you could be trying to solve the wrong problem. Your issue could be inflammation that's caused by food intolerance. The hidden cause of most weight gain is food intolerance. If you're inflamed, you gotta fix that or the weight is not gonna come off. Now we've been taught that foods like whole grains and non fat yogurt and egg white omelets are diet foods and the best options for weight loss. But the truth is, those so called healthy foods may actually be causing you to gain weight and sabotage your health. If you're eating all those ripe foods but still not making progress, there's a good chance food intolerance is the problem. So here are the foods that you're going to want to swap. Now, I've identified seven highly inflammatory foods that should be Voted most likely to prevent weight loss. Ready dairy, gluten, soy, corn, eggs, peanuts and then sugar and artificial sweeteners. Now, if you're intolerant to any of these foods, it can cause fatigue, bloating, digestive problems, joint pain and other symptoms that you wouldn't normally connect with food. So if you suspect food intolerance and if you haven't tried this, you definitely want to check out the Virgin diet. So, so that you can figure out which foods may be hurting you. It's also going to teach you how to swap them out for foods that will heal you. And that is a total game changer. And here's the deal. The swaps are easy and fun and they taste great. You're not going to give up anything except foods that are hurting you and you're gaining tastier foods that heal you. And by the way, you do it for three weeks, you do it for three weeks and I bet you within the first week you're going to see and feel a major difference. It can be as simple as swapping almond and flax or coconut milk for cow's dairy. Believe it or not, making that easy switch can have a huge impact on your weight and the way you look and feel. And it can do it fast. Now on to number three, add before you take away. I hope this sounds like the opposite of starving, because it is. This and some of the other strategies we'll talk about improves your blood sugar and insulin, which helps heal your metabolism and helps you drop the weight without all of this crazy extreme dieting. I mean, no one, no one gets excited about depriving themselves of deliciousness or pleasure ever, do we? So of course you dread a diet if that's what it's about, but instead you're going to add quality food and nutrients before you take anything away. I hope you're going to be all about this. Right? So in general, here's what this is going to look like. At each meal you're going to add two or more servings of non starchy veggies. And I want you to go wild here. You can't really overdo this. They're anti inflammatory, they're nutrient dense and they are loaded with phytonutrients and fiber. And you want to fill up with fiber as much as possible because it stabilizes your blood sugar and it helps heal, heal your gut and it's great for detox too. So add even more. So that's the first thing, all those non starchy vegetables and then you're going to add more fiber with things like legumes, nuts and seeds, avocados, berries. And of course those aren't free foods. Right. You're going to want to watch the amounts there and limit those starchy carbs and fruit to 2 servings max per meal and a total with the fat of about four servings. Now I go into detail on what all of this looks like in my how to build a plate video. And then you want to also make sure that you're adding enough protein. I find a lot of times people are overeating on the carbs and they've got bad blood sugar balance because they didn't start with protein first. So we're going to get in good high quality protein and you're going to make sure you choose wisely.

Remember, you are what you eat.

8 so wild seafood, pastured grass fed and finished beef and lamb, pastured chicken. And my favorite of all is in the morning, break your fast or it may be midday with a nutrient dense, I call it a loaded smoothie. And it's loaded because it's going to have clean protein from a high quality protein powder. It's going to have healthy fats from things like flax, avocado or nut milks. And then of course lots of fiber in there from veggies and a little bit of fruit. And you want to make sure that you are also drinking water throughout the day, especially in between your meals, because that pure spring water detoxifies you, help boost your metabolism and helps be you not hungry in between meals. And you've heard it so often, you're not really hungry, you're just thirsty. But our thirst mechanism sucks. So drink a lot of water in between meals. And then of course, another thing I want you to add is a good multivitamin, mineral, antioxidant formula and essential fatty acids. That's like your health assurance policy. Now when you've added the good stuff in, right, we've got the lots of non starchy vegetables, we've got clean protein coming in, we're making sure we're getting our healthy fats. We're getting a little bit of slow, low carbs quality, slow, low carbs. We're not going to mainline our carbs when you've added that good stuff in. Now you go to the next level and you start to swap those nutritionally bankrupt and inflammatory foods out of your diet for more nutrient dense healing foods. So give you a couple examples. You can try swapping your dairy milk for unsweetened nut milk or oat milk. Or flax milk. Honestly, you're going to like it better. You can swap those raisins for fresh berries. You can swap the traditional veggies for organic. Makes a huge difference. You can swap that muffin and the latte in the morning. You know what that muffin is? Look at a cupcake. Take the icing off, that's what you got. We're going to swap that one out for that loaded smoothie, right? So that you start the day off right whenever you break your fast. We're going to swap out that farm raised fish for wild fish, the peanut butter for nut butter, the popcorn for kale chips, those corn tortillas for coconut tortillas. See how easy this is? Honestly, there are so many healthy swaps and I hear all of the time, all of the time that my clients don't even want to go back to the old choices because they like all these swaps so much better. You're not going to feel deprived, I promise. All right, number four, balance your blood sugar. Now if you struggle with sugar cravings, it could be because you're insulin resistant. And the number one thing that helps reverse insulin resistance is to balance your blood sugar. And you do that by using the plate to build your meals. And the plate is where you have the protein, the fiber from non starchy vegetables and slow low carbs and healthy fats. You put that together and you've got great blood sugar balance. It's super duper important because all three of those work together to help keep you full and keep your blood sugar stable. So you do not crash. Because when you crash, what happens? You make bad decisions, bad choices. Now what's great about fat, the healthy fats is they are, are anti inflammatory, they're insulin neutral, they're not going to jack up insulin and blood sugar. And they're satiating, they send out little chemicals to tell your brain you're full. And then the protein and fiber work together to slow down stomach emptying so that you feel fuller, longer. Plus that fiber is so important for blood sugar balance and it can help get rid of the cravings all on its own. And then protein. And this is why I always go protein first with everything. Protein is thermic. It's got 20% more calorie burn so than the other macronutrients, carbs and fat. Right? So it requires more to be metabolized to be broken down and used. And it also slows down the blood sugar release to the body. All right, another tip for you. If you've got a sweet Tooth sour can help take it away. So try adding a little lemon juice to your water. That also helps lower your blood sugar response to the meal. Or a little apple cider vinegar to your salads. And add a little fermented food in. You start with a teaspoon and then get it up to a tablespoon every day. That can make a huge difference. And one more that's really helpful here, this supplement, Berberine. Berberine is amazing for helping you become insulin sensitive and to lower your blood sugar response to meals. So Berberine is huge here. Okay, number five, add muscle now. Muscle now doesn't work like that. Wouldn't it be amazing if it could? But we are here in the real world so we're going to have to work for it a little bit. First you're going to want to increase your protein intake because your body needs protein to make muscle. So make protein your first thought at every meal and build your plate around it. And here's what I recommend. As the floor, you want to do 1 gram per pound of lean body mass. And remember, your body is made up of fat and lean body mass. So you want to eat 1 gram per pound of lean body mass. And if you're trying to build muscle, if you're stressed out, if you're injured or sick, then push it to 1 gram per pound of ideal weight or a little bit more. I'm more concerned that you're not getting enough by the way than you're getting too much. Now if you eat animal protein, I want you to make sure that you choose high quality, clean, lean protein that is grass fed, grass finished beef and lamb, pastured poultry, wild caught seafood, okay? Because you are what you eat ate. Now if you're vegan or vegetarian, you're going to want to add some plant based protein powder to your morning loaded smoothie, right? Because you're going to have to work a little bit harder to make sure that you get everything that you need. Especially because most of your protein sources are going to come along with carbs or fats. So we gotta work a little bit harder there. So make sure you're vigilant. And then of course to add muscle, it's not just gonna happen cause you ate some protein, you have to exercise. And I hope you wanna exercise because exercise has huge dividends. Like it helps you get off that diet merry go round because it builds lean muscle which helps burn more calories than. And also when you build lean muscle which helps burn more calories, you become more insulin sensitive so that you can Lose more fat. Awesome. And when you put on more muscle, it helps strengthen your bones, which is super duper important. In fact, I call muscle metabolic Spanx because it holds everything in tighter and boosts your metabolic rate. Now, if I had to recommend the biggest bang for your exercise buck, it would be, of course, resistance training. And here's what's cool. You can do this anywhere. You don't have to go to the gym because you can use your body weight, think push ups, dips, squats, lunges, step ups, or you can use a TRX trainer. This is a great thing to travel with. You can literally turn your hotel room into a gym. And minutes. When I was traveling during the pandemic and everything was closed, this was my godsend. And you can just decide what you want to focus on. So you might want to focus on just upper body one time, lower body the next. But you're hitting each body part two to three times a week. Now, for faster results, you're going to want to add in high intensity interval training. I call that burst training. In fact, I say burst to blast fat because the benefits of this are crazy amazing. First of all, high intensity interval training increases growth hormone, which is going to help you with building and holding onto your muscle mass. It also high intensity interval training helps your body handle stress better. Super important. But the biggest thing about this, that's so cool. The number one reason people don't exercise, what do you think it is? They say they don't have time. First of all, I say make time. But here's the thing. You can do a big high intensity interval training workout in. Ready for it? 12 minutes. Because what you're going to do is warm up for about a minute, go all out for 30 seconds, recover for a minute, go all out for 30 seconds. Right. You do this to accumulate four to eight total minutes of hard stuff. And each time you do a hard stuff, your cover actively twice as long. I've done videos on this so you can see this, but you get it done quick. So that throws that little time thing that you said, that one's out the window. All right. Okay. Number six, optimize your sleep. I mean, poor sleep is such a massive problem. It's really like an epidemic at this point. And there is tons of reasons out there you could be having trouble sleeping. So let's look at some of them. Like maybe you're doing caffeine too late in the day. If you are not a fast metabolizer of caffeine, which you can find out in 23andMe. But you probably already know you need to keep that to the morning. Okay. Or maybe you're overdoing the wine. Cause you might think I'm gonna have some wine. It'll help me fall asleep. Yeah, it helps you fall asleep and then you wake up around 2 o', clock, so it doesn't help you stay asleep or you might be eating too late. I'm going to tell you something wild that just happened to me because I use an OURA ring and I eat normally around six o'. Clock. Seven is my latest and I go to bed around 10. So I always have three to four hours between when I eat and bedtime. Well, we were having an event and I ate late. There was like nothing I could do to avoid it. In retrospect, I should have just skipped, right? The next morning I get this little note on my aura ring that says, your resting heart rate lowered late last night. You ate late. And I'm like, oh my gosh, what are you spying on me? But it really does impact your sleep. So be careful with that or be careful with doing exercise later in the evening, an easy walk after dinner. That's your jam. That's what you want to do. And if you're doing a bunch of laptop stuff, first of all, do not do email at night. Come on. Nothing good. You're not going to find anything good at night. And if you're looking at tech, you got to wear those blue blockers. Okay? Whatever reason it is that you may not be sleeping well, here's some stuff that will help. First off, try to go to sleep and get up at the same time every day. Even if you don't go to sleep at the same time, get up at the same time every single day. The hour before you're going to bed is your power down hour. I Learned that from Dr. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor. That means all those devices, they go to bed, all right? They go to bed before you go to bed. And you create this whole calm. You lower the lights, you take the room temperature down to 65 to 68. You start doing some calming things like read a good book. I always say read a good, not great book. So you don't stay up, have some sleepy time tea, take an Epsom salts bath and take some of my sleep candy. I will tell you, every night I take my sleep candy from Reignite Wellness and my magnesium body calm. That's part of my routine, along with taking an Epsom salts bath and. And one that I really, really love. What you measure and monitor you can improve. So an Oura ring, an apple watch. I actually was wearing a Garmin and Apple watch in an Oura ring. All at once, you know, you need 1. Use 1 to track. So you can see. I discovered I really had some issues with deep sleep. So I was able to make some adjustments to fix it. So it's kind of fun, too. All right, number seven, stress. Handle it. All right, so stress, I think these last couple of years, stress has been mixed in with the air we breathe, right? Like next level stress. And it doesn't matter if you're dealing with financial pressure, health issues, homeschooling, or just like the crazy uncertainty of everything. Right now, stress is stress, and it really takes a toll on your body. And here's the deal. You can't just hope it will go away, because guess what? It won't. Now, you could be doing everything else right, but if you are not handling your stress, it is going to take you down. Now, you probably already know stress can make you gain weight, but it can also make you age faster and it can wreak havoc on your hormones. Now, we're built to handle some stress, but we are not built to handle excess chronic stress. That just puts us into this survival mode and cranks up our stress hormones like cortisol. And then that cortisol impacts your sleep, makes you irritable and hungry, and it does not make you hungry for salmon, let's be honest. And if you're an emotional eater, stress just turns the volume up on that. So as the pounds creep up, this is probably about the time you go, huh? Maybe I need to go back on that diet. So we've touched on a couple of strategies to get you off that diet roller coaster. And they're also going to help with stress. So for one, you're going to eat by the plate because it's going to help stabilize your blood sugar and hormones. And I mentioned green tea. And green tea has an amino acid called L theanine. And L theanine naturally reduces blood pressure and anxiety. And if you've got any issues, you can do the decaf version, right? So green tea is a great one. Now, there's also exercise, which we talked about, but even a short walk after meals. And that is one that is like, add that in after dinner, go for a walk. It's going to reduce stress, and it also helps lower your blood sugar response to the meal. And then, of course, good sleep. That's going to be the biggest thing that's going to help here. But here are a few other things that you can think about trying now. One of my favorite de stressors of all, chocolate. I know. So when you go for the chocolate though, you want to make sure it's this. I'm not talking like a milk chocolate thing. I am chalking high cacao, no sugar. So what I do, you can either do 85% or higher or make sure that you are getting one that does not have sugar added. Maybe they used allulose, monk fruit stevia. Here's why you want to do dark chocolate. The flavanols in dark chocolate boost brain function, lower stress hormones, right? So that you keep focused and calm. Another thing that I love is lavender. You can put it on your pillow, you can put it in your bath. Lavender reduces your blood pressure and heart rate and it's a natural antidepressant that stabilizes your mood. How cool is that? And then my new favorite thing, meditation, which is super relaxing and a great stress management tool because it really helps you calm down your nervous system. Another thing that can help calm down your nervous system is EFT trapping. Tapping. EFT is called Emotional Freedom Technique and it's tapping on specific points of your body, your head, your face, and then focusing on the issue you want to treat. You can check that out with my buddy Nick Ortner of the tapping solution. And last but not least, here are my favorite de stressing supplements. Magnesium Body Calm, Vitamin C. By the way, vitamin C is the big vitamin your adrenals use and they'll just blow it out. So if you're under stress, you're going to want to have more vitamin C, the B vitamins and omega 3s. These are all part of my every single day routine. And look how not stressed I am. So there you go. Follow these recommendations and before you know it, you'll have some great new hobbies. And dieting won't be one of them. Now, if you enjoyed this, please let me know by hitting, like and subscribing. See you again soon. 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 subscribetoj.com thanks again for being with me this week.

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