Intermittent Fasting Mistakes That Make You GAIN WEIGHT

Hey, it's J.J. here.

You know, I've been talking about environmental toxins forever and laundry detergent is a sneaky one. A lot of them contain harsh chemicals like dyes, preservatives, and even UV brighteners. Those brighteners don't actually clean anything. They just coat fabric so your eyes think things look whiter or brighter. That's more chemicals I don't want on my family sheets or skin. And if you've got sensitive skin or allergies around the house, this can be a big problem. That's what got my attention about Earth Breeze. It looks like a dryer sheet, but it's actually laundry detergent. You toss one in the washer and that's it. No pouring, no mess, and no heavy plastic jug. Their packaging is lightweight cardboard, which helps reduce plastic waste. And if you choose the fragrance free option, it's gentle, hypoallergenic, non irritating and non sensitizing. I really like how simple it is and how fresh and clean everything comes.

Out without those unnecessary chemicals.

Right now you can try Earth Breeze for up to 40% off with free gifts@earthbreeze.com virgin that's earthbreeze.com virgin for up to 40% off plus free gifts on your first order.

Hey JJ here. Every year around this time, I get the urge to make my home feel a little extra special. A space that feels just like the holidays.

And Wayfair is my go to for that.

Think cozy textures, twinkly decor, warm lighting.

And all those little touches that make.

You want to curl up with a good book and a blanket. You'll usually find my book stacked on a great little end table I got from Wayfair, proof that function and style can coexist.

Now, whether you're adding last minute hosting.

Essentials, picking out gifts for loved ones, or refreshing your decor for the season, Wayfair makes it easy with beautiful finds, great prices and fast delivery. And when the holidays wind down, Wayfair has everything you need to tuck it all neatly away. Smart storage solutions for every room from the kitchen to the closet. Plus, with free shipping for any order over $35, that's fast delivery and a total peace of mind. It's the perfect mix of joy and order, bringing the holiday spirit in, then storing it all with EAs ready to make your home feel as good as it looks. Get organized, refreshed and ready for the holidays. For way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. Wayfair Every style, Every home that's W A Y f a I r.com Ray.

Ban meta Glasses come with open ear audio so you can listen to your favorite music without blocking out the world around you.

Hey Meta, play Gorgeous.

Here's Gorgeous by Doja Cat.

You can also ask Meta AI questions.

Hey Meta, when's Doja Cat's next concert?

Doja Cat is playing at the Los Angeles Theater next Tuesday.

Sweet Ray Ban Meta Glasses available at Ray Ban stores and other authorized retailers.

I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.

And 50.

Hey JJ, virgin here.

Okay, real talk.

So often the holidays sneak up on me.

Travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things and suddenly it's like, wait, who.

Spent what and where?

And I know I'm not the only.

One who's looked at a bill in.

January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances.

Under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch.

It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone, Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could.

Be a real goal.

This time, don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year, that's 50% off. Your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin.

Welcome to Walgreens. What can I help you with today?

Hi, I need a last minute gift for a secret Santa. Something thoughtful, impressive. Not a fruitcake.

We've got Ferrero chocolates, artisan coffees, even a spa kit. Any vibe you're going for whatever says wow.

This guy's great at giving gifts.

How about this premium skincare gift set? Just needs a bowl. Will look like you planned it weeks ago.

Well, happy holidays, gifts, holiday decor, and more. The holiday road is long.

We're with you all the way, Walgreens.

You're doing intermittent fasting all wrong if you're making these mistakes. Now I'm gonna share the common pitfalls I see all the time that can sabotage your fat loss and actually make you gain weight instead. So let's avoid doing this and making all of your hard work go to waste. Deal. So the first one is not syncing your circadian rhythm. Ignoring your body's natural clock can mess with your metabolism. That means eating too late in the day or at odd hours. It can disrupt your insulin sensitivity and that means increase fat storage. There was a 2021 review in Nutrients Journal special issue on diet, obesity and type 2 diabetes and hypertension that emphasized that our internal clock regulates fat vital hormonal activities that control metabolism, influencing how we process food, sleep and manage body weight. Now, our modern lifestyle, which often includes irregular meal times, night shifts and late night eating, disrupt these natural rhythms. This mismatch between our biological and social clocks can impair insulin efficiency and hinder fat loss. Practices like time restricted eating, which align meal times with daylight hours, can can help synchronize eating schedules with circadian rhythms, enhancing metabolic health. Optimal meal times are recommended in the morning and early afternoon to maximize the efficiency of metabolic processes and prevent metabolic disorders. And I want to do a big shout out here to Dr. Satchin Panda and their circadian code where he talks about this and really focusing on getting our calories in during the day, during the sunlight and when we're active. So here's how I take this information and put it into use. I match my eating to my circadian clock. So in the morning I eat about two hours after I wake up. The reason I wait about two hours is I want to give time for my pancreas to get online so it's ready to secrete insulin when I eat. I also stop eating three hours before bed. Now I'd love it to be four hours. My Hard rule is at least two, but ideally it's somewhere two to four hours before bed.

A little longer is better.

Think about that. If you are sleeping eight hours or so, you're in bed eight hours or so when you just stopped eating three hours before bed and you ate about two hours earlier in the morning, you already have somewhere in the 10 to 12 hour eating window right there. And my line there is to make sure you have minimally a 12 hour fasting window. But somewhere in the 9 to 12 hours is probably just about right now. If you want to shorten your window a little bit, see how it works for you, see how it works for your schedule and, and your hunger. Because that brings me to point number two. If you get too hungry, and that's overeating during feeding windows, I know they talk about fast and feast, but don't take the feast too literally. Right? It's tempting to compensate for the fasting period by like going a little crazy and eating much more during your allowed eating times. Just because you've compressed your eating window, isn't it giving you a free for all during that time? Cause it's easy to consume more calories than you burn. And guess what happens if you eat more than you can burn? You're going to wear it. There was a comprehensive review in 2017 issue of Current Diabetes Reports that illustrated how caloric restriction can play a critical role in enhancing the benefits of fast. Intermittent fasting, particularly when you're doing this for weight loss. And there's a couple other cool things about caloric restriction here. When you limit calories, you trigger a lot of the beneficial mechanisms that by the way are also what we trigger with intermittent fasting, like activating cellular stress responses, improving cell cle up processes, you know, autophagy, adjusting cell death, that apoptosis, and also rebalancing hormones. While intermittent fasting is generally more manageable, it's a little bit easier to restrict calories if you just say, hey, I'm not eating at night. Like if we just cut out that after dinner, most people would save hundreds of calories. And what's also cool here is generally intermittent fasting is going to reduce the risk of some of the malnutrition that you can see with with big continuous caloric restriction. However, you really got to make sure that you don't get into the binge eating after fasting. That's the big important thing here to make sure that you're maintaining these long term health improvements that you'd get from this. So how do I Do this. I know me. And if I get too hungry, it's really bad news for me. I will overeat. So I refer to point number one and I make sure that I'm working with my optimal circadian rhythm for me and I'm an n of 1. We're all different, right? I find that I'm hungrier early in their day. Like I do really well eating about two hours after I wake up in the morning. If I was going to skip a meal, generally it would be dinner. That's when I'm not as hungry later in the day. And in fact, sometimes we'll end up going out later with friends and I'm kind of like, I'm done. Like I'm not even hungry at this point. Figure out what works best for you because here's the deal. Even if you're eating healthy, if you're overeating too much healthy food is not healthy. Now, one thing I'm not really worried about you overeating on, I'm more worried about you not getting enough of is protein. Because when you combine protein not getting enough with caloric restriction, you have a recipe for muscle loss. In fact, what do we know? 25 to 40% muscle loss happens for most poorly designed diets. So you hear a lot about muscle loss with things like semaglutide. It's actually not the drug, it's the diet. There was a study done in 2006, it was a non randomized controlled trial, it was an animal study. It was published in the Faceb Journal and it found that caloric restriction without sufficient protein diminishes muscle strength and mass and contributes to overall reduced muscle function. And again, that is significant for any type of diet. So any diet that doesn't have enough protein and you're not eating, you're not doing resistance training, will cause muscle loss. We want to avoid that at all cost. So what's my strategy to make sure that this doesn't happen to you? Eat protein first and we're going to weigh and track your protein because that way we know you're getting what you need. And the other thing I love here, here's my hack for this, is to also take some essential amino acids with it. Every morning I take essential amino acids alongside my breakfast. I'm also starting to do them as dinner as well, just so I make sure that my muscles have what they need to rebuild. Now I have a 7 day eat protein first challenge that makes it super easy for you to start increasing your protein intake. What's Cool is it comes with a little calculator so you can figure out how much protein you need. Plus it's got great recipes and all of my best tips. And you can get that@jjvirgin.com seven day and that's the number seven. Now, along with not getting enough protein, the other big challenge is choosing low quality foods. We talked about breaking your fast and eating too much. We also want to watch what you're eating because we got to make sure that you're getting that nutrient density. So if you break your fast with foods that are high in sugar or bad fats, the crappy ultra processed foods, guess what? That's going to spike your insulin and your blood sugar can lower your metabolic rate. We know that about ultra processed foods. They actually can lower your metabolic rate. So, so what do we need? We need to make sure that what you're eating counts, that every calorie counts, that you're getting nutrient dense foods that support your goals. Things like of course that clean protein, loads of non starchy vegetables, little bit of fruit. There was a study in 2021, it was a review in the Nutrients Journal that underscores that breaking a fast with high quality nutrient rich foods can positively affect metabolism and insulin resistance. Which supports the idea that the intersection between diet quality and the timing of food intake is critical and that what you eat after fasting can significantly impact your health outcomes. Circadian rhythmicity affects both eating behavior and multiple gut functions as well as the composition and interactions of the microbiome with the gut. I remember years ago when the sugar impact diet was coming out, I was on the Today show and I was on the Today show with the author of the 168 book, David Chinchenko. He also wrote the book Eat this, Not that. Remember that book? And what was so funny during this interview as we were going back and forth, still don't know why they put us together. It was kind of didn't really flow well. But he was saying, you know, you can actually eat the. Not that, but just eat it during this window. And I'm like come on, that doesn't make sense. It's important to note that just because you're eating during a smaller window doesn't mean it's a free for all that you can eat whatever you want. You want to ensure that you're eating protein first, then adding in your non starchy veggies and some healthy fat, then some slow carbs, things with high fiber or fruit, as close to nature as possible. You know, the way that we have been eating all along they eat by the plate way. Now, one other thing, and I remember hearing about this from Dr. Satchampanda is kind of making your mealtimes all over the place because your body gets used to things and you know that if you're used to eating breakfast at eight and all of a sudden it's nine, you haven't eaten, you're hungry. So inconsistent fasting windows can be a problem. Switching up your fasting times too often can confuse your body and may lead to some hormonal imbalances, which of course then makes it even harder to lose weight. So you got to be consistent and remember, you're an N of 1, so you're being consistent, you're listening to your body to see what timing works best for you. There was a 2023 study on intermittent fasting by King's Cross College. This is the largest UK community science study of its kind. And it revealed significant health benefits associated with a 10 hour eating window, which I love because I think that's so doable for all of us. And it showed that those who are consistent with their eating window eating at the same time had better benefits than those who were shifting their eating window day to day. Now, again, I first heard about this with Dr. Satchin Panda, about how important it is to keep your eating times consistent because your body is going to adapt to this and it will start to prepare for incoming food. So just like you want to keep your bedtime and wake time consistent, get your food, food intake into a consistent schedule as well. Oh, and your exercise too. All right, next up, neglecting hydration. So fasting can make it easy to forget about staying hydrated. And dehydration, as you know, can slow down metabolism and increase hunger signals, which could just cause you to eat more. There was a 2022 observational study that was published in Frontiers in Nutrition that found that people often don't drink enough water and beverages during fasting, which can lead to dehydration. Researchers discovered that the most common drinking pattern during Ramadan is 2, 4, 2. By the way, that's two glasses at sunset, four glasses at nighttime, two glasses pre dawn. But a pattern of 4, 2, 2, which would be four glasses at sunset, two at nighttime, two pre dawn, is more effective in helping people meet their daily water intake recommendations. So what do we do with this information? And this is a biggie, because even mild dehydration, we know can slow down weight loss, raise cortisol, but more importantly can actually take glycogen out of the liver, convert it to fructose and make you store it as fat. So let's avoid this. Here's what I do. I make sure that I carry around, I literally carry around a 64 ounce bottle of water a day. That is my minimum. You want to have half your weight, half your body weight in pounds, right? So if you weigh 140 pounds, that would be 70 ounces of water. So if it's kgs, it's just the same. So if you're 65 kgs, 65 ounces of water. So half your body weight in ounces plus 1/2 to 1 ounce per minute of exercise. And what I like to do in there too is I add in my electro replenish. So I'm adding in my electrolytes as well to at least one serving a day. If I'm sweating a lot, I do it to two servings a day.

And I'd rather err on a little.

Bit more water than a little bit less. And then finally, let's talk about skipping micronutrients because one of the things we want to make sure is that everything is counting, that you're eating very nutrient dense, but likely when you're eating less frequently, your body not getting everything that it needs. And your body still needs all of the stuff it needs, the vitamins and the minerals, essential fatty acids, right, the essential amino acids. So you got to make sure that you're getting this. Because neglecting this, of course is going to impact your body's overall health and can impact your body's ability to lose weight too. There is a 2020 randomized controlled trial published in Clinical Nutrition that looked at macronutrient and micronutrient intake following the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet. And what that study found was that several micronutrients, including calcium and zinc and magnesium and potassium were lower than what was recommended during the guidelines. But for those fasting days, and despite the fact that they could eat what they wanted on the non fasting days, they couldn't make up those deficiencies. So intermittent fasting could lead to insufficiencies in your micronutrients. So what's my tip on that? I think that we all need to be taking a good multivitamin mineral antioxidant formula. This to me is your health assurance policy super duper important. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure.

You look and feel great and are built to last.

Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website, jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you.

Hear, don't forget to leave a review.

Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice or from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Boeckle, 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 check all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next reading. 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 whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.