I Recently Went Into Remission From Cancer. Any Recommendations for Getting Healthier and Staying in Remission?
15 Dec 2025 · 6 min
This content was created by JJ Virgin. This content was uploaded by JJ Virgin. This is a podcast titled "I Recently Went Into Remission From Cancer. Any Recommendations for Getting Healthier and Staying in Remission?" created on June 28, 2021. It features JJ Virgin, a four-time New York Times bestselling author and celebrity nutrition expert, discussing health and wellness topics, including holiday preparations, environmental toxins, and financial management. The podcast includes a segment with Dr. Heather Paulson, a naturopathic oncologist, who provides advice on staying healthy and in remission from cancer, focusing on exercise, lab work, and diet.
Questions this episode answers
February 14th.
About 170 minutes of vigorous exercise per week.
Up to 72 hours after exercise.
Approximately 440 grams of fiber or more per day.
Keep saturated fats to less than 30% of overall daily calories.
Chapters
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I Recently Went into Remission From Cancer Any recommendations for getting healthier and staying in remission? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Janet Cohen from Facebook asks. I went into remission for metastatic ovarian cancer February 14th. Any recommendations for getting healthier and stay staying in remission? Hey, it's J.J. and I've got Dr. Heather Paulson. She's a board certified naturopathic oncologist with me to answer this question. After she experienced cancer with some of her loved ones, she made the change from a career as a marine biologist to going to get her naturopathic doctor license to specialize in cancer treatments. And she teaches people how to get and stay healthy while undergoing cancer treatments. In fact, she shows people that they can be even healthier than before while undergoing cancer treatments. She's also a longtime yoga and meditation teacher and a new fur mom to a puppy in training to be a therapy dog. We'll be right back with the answer.
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Oh my gosh. I love this question about how to stay healthy and how to stay in remission. So, so important. And I know that that's the forefront of every cancer survivor's mind is how do I stay in remission? But most importantly, how do we improve our health or stay healthy? And there's three things that I think are really important for reducing risk of recurrence and staying healthy. The first one is exercise. Exercise, although it doesn't come in a capsule and it's not something that you take outside of yourself, it is so important for reducing risk of recurrence. In fact, one of the studies showed that women who had ovarian cancer that did vigorous exercise, vigorous intensity of exercise, had a 26% reduction in risk of recurrence. So that's just from doing about 170 minutes of exercise per week. And you can break it up however you'd like. You don't have to do it all at once, and you don't have to do it all every day of the week. You can do 90 minutes twice a week. You can do 30 minutes a day. It's really up to you. The other benefit of exercising is that it reduces leptin, which is a hormone that has been directly linked to increasing ovarian cancer cell growth. So anything that you can do to help improve leptin levels and reduce leptin levels is going to help your overall survival. The other thing that exercise does that I think is so fascinating is that it creates this force in your blood vessels, right? We get our Blood pumping is what we say when we're exercising. And when we get our blood pumping, it actually can cut apart circulating tumor cells. So it's, it's called shear force because it shears the cells along the walls of the blood vessels and makes them break apart. And this effect of circulating tumor cells breaking apart after exercise lasts for up to 72 hours. So it's really important to exercise. The second thing is to make sure you have lab work done to check in on the terrain of your body or the microenvironment of tumor cells. So we're looking for things like inflammation, we're looking at blood glucose levels and insulin levels, hemoglobin A1C, we're looking at insulin like growth factor. These are things that are specific to ovarian cancer and specific to promoting ovarian cancer cell growth. Also looking at vitamin D and hormones like estrogen that can stimulate ovarian cancer growth. The third thing to do is to make sure you're eating a healthy diet. But there's specific things in diet that have been shown to improve survival in women with ovarian cancer. So this is a long term study in women with ovarian cancer that looked at exactly what components of a diet reduces risk of recurrence and helps improve survival. And this study showed that a high fiber diet, so 440 grams of fiber or more per day, reduced risk of recurrence. Eating a diet that was high in green leafy vegetables, any type of green leafy vegetables. They looked at different leafy vegetables, see if one had more benefits than the other, and they couldn't find one that outperformed any other vegetable. So any green leafy vegetables, also with moderate fruit intake, can be helpful. A diet that's higher in fish, reduced risk of recurrence and improved survival. A diet that was higher in monounsaturated fats. So monounsaturated fats are olive oils and avocado oils. Those did best compared to any other types of fat in terms of improving survival. Eating foods that are on a low glycemic index also improve overall survival and then avoiding saturated fats. So making sure you're not eating too many saturated fats and keeping saturated fats being less than 30% of your overall calories per day. So again, that's exercise lab work and diet. And I think those are the places to get started for reducing risk of ovarian cancer, coming back and getting healthy and staying in remission.
This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week. So make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.
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