Is Snacking Healthy? with JJ Virgin

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The people who are for snacking will tell you that snacking keeps your blood sugar stable and keeps your energy up. Well, let's pull that apart. The deal is it keeps your blood sugar up.

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.

So a couple years ago I got this box in the mail, like this big, big box. And I open it up. It is from Frito Lay. And Frito Lay has invited me to join their snacking council. And they have sent me a whole bunch of and if you could see me, I'm making the little like those little things around a word, healthy snacks. So I thought, do you not know who I am? Today we're going to be talking about snacking. And full disclosure, I'm a recovering snacker. And I bet a lot of you listening are or maybe you're still snacking. And that's what we're going to be fixing today. I'm going to share with you why meal timing matters. How to shift from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. Yes, snacking. Snacking will shut that fat burning down. And what you really, how you really want to eat in terms of timing because timing matters. And so I think back to my snacking career. I'm a recovering snackaholic because back when I was a personal trainer, I used to go from house to house to house. I literally would start between 5:30 and 6am and I would work out with a client. Get in the car, go to the next house. Get in the car, go to the next house. You get the idea. And the only thing that would change throughout the day is I would throw grad school in and, and then if I hadn't possibly worked out enough because I had to compensate for all that snacking, then I would go to the gym too, which is just crazy. And at the time everything was low fat, more vegetarian. I would just literally eat like a frozen yogurt and sourdough bread and fat free muffins. Like all this Kind of stuff all day long. Oh, my gosh. I would have a cooler with me. Ah. So I want to save you from this craziness. So today again, we're going to talk about whether you should snack. What's going on with that? And I, I know it might sound like a great idea because you hear it keeps your blood sugar balanced. Right. And your energy up. But we're gonna blow those myths up here in a moment. But before we dive in, I want to do a shout out. I want to do a shout out to Mississippi Colleen. Five stars in Apple reviews. Thank you. Thank you. Dear jj, I'm so enjoying your podcast. I only discovered this a couple of months ago and now listen several times a week. I'm far from perfect and still have so much to learn, but I really trust your knowledge and advice. Following that, I've avoided surgery. Crazy, right? In June, I had my first bout with diverticulitis. Out of shape, eating whatever. And now in my early 50s. Led to my predicament, I'm sure. After a week in the hospital, my doctors were planning surgery to remove part of my colon. This fall, I started reading the Virgin diet book on ebook while still in the hospital and started it the next week. Not only do I feel better, the colonoscopy Aug. 30 showed a healing colon. And at my follow up with the surgeon, they said they saw no reason to re to schedule surgery at that time. Keep doing whatever you're doing, they said. So thank you. You're saving my life. I gotta just say as an aside, why don't they ask what the heck she's doing? Come on. It makes me crazy. Like, wouldn't you be a little curious? Anyway, thank you so much, Mississippi Colleen. Yay for you for doing that. So awesome. You get all of the kudos there. And I also want to thank you for leaving that review. Those help a bunch. If you have not left a review yet, guess what? You can do it. Go to subscribe to jj There you can subscribe so you never miss a show because now we have three, count them, three, coming out every week. And you can leave a review. Let us know what you love. Let us know if there's something you like to see. We are all ears and eyes wanting to continuously uplevel the show to give you what we can to support you being your healthiest you. All right, so before we dive into the snack. Snack gate, as I'll call it, I've got another fun thing to share with you. Hang tight.

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All right, we are back and talking snacking. We're throwing some meal time in two, so let's talk snacking. Should you? Should you not? So the pro people, the people who are for snacking, will tell you that snacking keeps your blood sugar stable and keeps your energy up. Well, let's pull that apart. The deal is it keeps your blood sugar up because every time you're eating, what happens? You raise your blood sugar. When you raise your blood sugar, which is a fast moving freight train, you raise your insulin because your body raises insulin to bring that blood sugar back down to normal levels. Because you don't want high blood sugar because blood sugar is sticky, elevated blood sugar sticky and inflammatory. And so you do not want to keep that blood sugar up. In fact, if your blood sugar is at a fasting level is 90, which is just 10 higher than where you should be. Like you should be 70 to 80, you have five times the risk of dementia. So we do not want to walk around with slightly elevated blood sugar. Now you eat, your blood sugar comes up, your insulin comes down, up too to bring that blood sugar back down. Blood sugar comes back down, but insulin still stays high. Insulin's longer acting, it takes longer to come back down. If you eat again before insulin's had a chance to return to normal fasting levels, that insulin just stays there or bumps up a little bit more. And the problem with insulin staying up is that insulin basically lock the doors to fat cells. You cannot burn off stored fat for fuel, and it's inflammatory. And over time, all that insulin will start to make your receptors resistant to the message. Your body needs to pump out more and more insulin to get the same response. Until finally your, your pancreas just goes, I give up. And boom, now you're into prediabetes or diabetes, which is like overtaking our country. So there's the dark side of snacking. And again, I came from years ago, I still remember it. And it coincided with when fat started getting pulled out of food. Fat was considered the demon devil. And we started eating higher carb stuff and snacking came along. Remember snack wells, fat free cookies? What could possibly go wrong with that? And these 100 calorie snack packs. And you were supposed to have breakfast and a snack and lunch and a snack and dinner and oh my gosh, better have a snack before bed too. It was called grazing. This is what we were supposed to do. You're never supposed to let yourself get hungry. And I diligently was doing what I was being taught in school. And what I noticed from this, because your body is going to do exactly what you tell it to do, is that I was working out crazy amounts. I was in my 20s, working out crazy amounts as a personal trainer, working out with a lot of my clients and eating little snacks all day long. Not excessive amounts of calories though, just a lot of like a continuous feeding, right? And my body fat was anywhere from 5 to 10% higher than it is now. I was working out at least four times more, maybe more crazy. And I just never felt great. I always would feel if I didn't eat for a couple hours, I felt hangry. Because when you eat all the time, you train your body to guess what, expect food all the time to expect to get that energy from the food you're eating, not from being able to access stored fat for fuel. You are not metabolically flexible. You are a sugar burner, not a fat burner. How can you tell? Because you can't go more than two to three hours without a meal. If you miss a meal, if you miss a snack, you start to get hangry, irritated, etc. And you know that feeling. And it's a rotten, rotten feeling. And if you are feeling, if you are a fat burner, you can go hours between meals, 4 to 6 hours. You can easily do an extended overnight fast. 12 hours, 14 hours. You forget to eat. Yes. I never used to forget to eat. I was, when someone said, oh, I forgot, did I eat lunch? I forgot. I was like, I don't understand. Now I get it. So super important that you are obviously moving into being a fat burner, not a sugar burner, that you're metabolically flexible so that you can go longer between meals and that you don't need those snacks. And I'm not saying, hey, never ever snack. There are times I'll eat a late breakfast. Sometimes I eat a late breakfast and early dinner and that's it. Sometimes I eat three meals. Sometimes I might eat three meals and need to throw in a snack. I listen to my body, but I also listen and go, huh, Am I really hungry? And this is super important because quite often you've heard it, you've heard it, you've heard it. We're not really hungry, we're thirsty. Always start. I drink a ton of beverages right now on my table I've got my black bulletproof coffee with a little bit of foamed up coconut milk and cream on top. I so good. And I have a suja lemon love. So I drink a lot of fluids throughout the day. Water, green tea, sparkling water, black coffee. Keep yourself super duper hydrated. Start with that first. And then I wait and I wait till I'm really hungry. Not like, oh, could I possibly be hungry? And I, I love a phrase that I heard from my buddy, Dr. Joel Kahn. He says hunger equals younger. Remember when you are allowing yourself to get down to fasting levels of blood sugar and insulin, you can access stored fat for fuel. Your body also with longer time periods between eating trigger something called autophagy. And it's sort of like detox for your cells where it can go in and get rid of some of the bad damaged cells. And we want to do that. We want that piece too. So let me give you some techniques. If you are A snacker right now and you're going, how the heck am I going to break free of this? And we do a lot of this in the Sugar Impact diet. That's a book about reclaiming your metabolic flexibility. But I'll give you a couple things that will help you start there. Because in my roadmap for how to get healthy, because we get healthy over time, not overnight. And it's a constant process. We're always peeling that onion. The first thing I have you do is improve food quality. And then the next thing I have you do is start to shorten that feeding window. So step one is to really look at how to unprocess your diet and how to improve food quality. So I like you to eat from what I call the trifecta, the satiety trifecta of clean protein, anti inflammatory fats and fiber. The reason this is so important is this is going to stabilize, not raise, but stabilize blood sugar, which is the key to everything. And when you have better stable blood sugar, the next meal you'll have a better response to. There's something called a second meal phenomenon. And it is if you go and eat that crappy meal, high carb, high sugar impact, not much healthy fat, fiber or protein, protein, then you'll just tend to be hungrier for that second meal. You start a hormonal chaos that will continue on. So that's one thing that we want to look at. So again, the satiety trifecta, clean protein. Protein, of course is super important for satiety. It keeps ghrelin, a hormone produced by the stomach. At base, you're not as hungry. It works with fiber to do that. They both slow down stomach emptying. And so of course it also helps with building and preserving lean muscle mass too. So what are great protein sources? Animal sources, of course, are wild fish, especially things like halibut and salmon, grass fed beef, pastured pork and chicken if you are not intolerant to them, pastured eggs. And then if you're vegan, legumes, lentils, chia seeds, seeds of all kind, nuts, quinoa. So lots of great options out there. Next one, healthy fats. All right, super key. I remember back when I was following this snacking regimen that worked so well, not for my body. I was hungry all the time and it was because I was eating so low fat. And fat is key for stalling hunger. It triggers the release of some neuropeptides in the small intestine to tell your brain you're full. It also can slow the release of sugar in the bloodstream. So super important. Now a lot of the protein sources can also come with healthy fats. So if you're eating the wild fish or the the grass fed beef, you're going to get some healthy fats there too. Avocado is one of my favor because it also comes with a lot of fiber. Ditto freshly ground flaxseed meal, chia seeds. And then of course things like coconut oil, which is rich in MCTs, which are really easy for your body to burn off. Super energizing. And then straight fish oil. I take fish oil every single day. So there are healthy fats and then fiber. Fiber works with protein to keep ghrelin, the hormone that triggers hunger in your stomach, suppressed. Fiber, of course, does so many other great things. It helps with balancing blood sugar. Super important. It helps with feeding the good bacteria in the gut, which is really critical for cravings and appetite and weight loss. So great sources of fiber. And this is where the sugar impact diet really comes into play to help you identify ones that are lower in sugar impact and generally the least processed, the more fiber. So things like broccoli, brussels sprouts, leafy greens. Potato is a really interesting one in green bananas because they are richer in something called resistant starch, which resists digestion and can help you burn more fat. Wild rice, quinoa, winter squashes, and I do a lot of non starchy vegetables and then a small amount of starchy and with everything done to either elevate resistant starch or make sure that they're as minimally processed as possible. So there you are, that's how you can eat by your trifecta. So like simple examples of that could be like one of our simple dinners we do. We always keep clean protein in the freezer. And then we do like wild rice and brown broth and we stir fry in some cauliflower rice in with that. So good. So I'll do two parts cauliflower rice to one part wild rice after it's cooked and then put, you know, piece of wild salmon or grass fed beef and away you go. Simple, easy peasy. Or make some broccoli, put some ghee on it, add a little bit of, I do small roasted fingerling potatoes, let them cool down to elevate the resistant starch. Have some wild salmon or pastured chicken. I mean super easy things to do. Doesn't take you long in the kitchen, but you saw that protein, fat and fiber, great for steady blood sugar. Now a couple more things that are going to help with getting you to be able to extend that time period. Because again, one of the first things I have people do is, is extend your. Make sure you close the kitchen three to four hours before bed, get your 12 hour overnight fast and then start to extend. If you've been eating every two to three hours, make it every three to four hours and get a lot of fluid in between, track your fluid in between, use your diet journal. And then as soon as you can hit the three to four hours, go to four to five hours. You hit the four to five hours, go to five to six hours. And then we start to look at taking that overnight fast from 12 hours to 10 hours. So this is something you just continue to work on. Again, really look at how to balance your blood sugar and how to use a lot of fluid. That's the next secret here is drinking. Because again, so often we are not hungry, we're thirsty. In fact, there was a great study that showed that drinking a glass of water before bed shut down 100% of dieters evening hunger pangs. 100%. That's just crazy. Besides, it helps helps with detox, boost your metabolism, energizing. So all sorts of great things that you can do there. All right. Other one that you might know about, might not know about is glutamine can help with some of the hunger pangs there too. So glutamine, throwing a little glutamine, just 3 grams into your daily shake can help tremendously. So here's a couple things that I do do though, is I always carry one of my bars with me. I travel a ton, as you know, and I always carry, I carry bars with me on the road to make sure that I never end up with any kind of a challenge there. So I never run, run out of food. So it like just in case I'm on a plane or stuck in an airport and I just have crappy options. I have always got it covered because I always have bars with me. So that's what I do. Or if I know, like, let's say I got up, up at 7, I'm gonna go work out at 9. I'm not really hungry yet, but I'm like, I feel like I need something. I love it when I can go work out in the morning without having eaten, but it doesn't always work for me. And that's the case where I'll have like a small amount of a protein shake or I'll have a little bit of a bar. Same with if I go and work out and let's say I got up, I went, I got up at 7, I had a shake around 9:30. I went and worked out at 11. Not really hungry after the workout, but I know I want to get something in to refuel my glycogen stores. That's where I might use the other half of the protein shake or a bar or something like that as well. So there are things like that. Or if you're out, let's say I had a late breakfast, I'm out and I know I'm going to miss lunch. Lunch and I'm going to come home, have an early dinner. That's where I'll use a bar. I use bars as my emergency food. Make sure you don't buy. We'll put our resources in jjvirgin.com forward/snack. I'm going to put in there our bars and resources, a snacking list if you do need it because I think you should always carry emergency food with you. Super important. So now I'm going to dive into a break and when I come back, I'm going to give you my top action steps from today to help you stop the snacking.

All right?

Hang with me.

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Okay, so here you go. I always like to take this time to help you with a specific challenge or action step to put this into immediate action. And so with this one, let's just walk it through. If you are snacking right now, what I want you to first do is improve the quality of your food. Eat from that trifecta that I talked about so you start to balance your blood sugar. Step one, step two, stop eating, you know, three to four hours before bed and give yourself that 12 hour overnight window. And then step three, let's start extending that time. Make sure you're getting your water in between meals. Super duper, duper important. Get the water in between meals. And if you were eating every two to three hours, let's take it to three to four hours and then take it to four to five hours and the Next one is always carry emergency food with you. You never know when you're getting it stuck somewhere and this way you'll make sure that you don't get caught somewhere starving with really poor options. And again, first thing you're always going to do is drink some water, ice cream, tea, cup of coffee and and give it some time because quite often you're not really hungry anyway. Alrighty. Wanted to just remind you one more time, we'll have show notes@jjvirgin.com snack we'll put a list of some choices that you can take with you so that you're never caught stuck out somewhere. We'll also put a picture of the plate so you can see how that trifecta plays out. Make it super easy for you to put into action because again, that's my biggest thing is give you great information and then let you know how to get started so that you can keep going. Because knowledge without action is just noise, right? We want to make sure that you're constantly improving and so that we can constantly improve. Make sure you subscribe to JJ and while you're there, leave a review. Let me know what you love. Let me know what you'd love to see if there's something we can improve on. If there's something you'd like to know more about. We've got three shows a week. We've got my guest show, my solo show, and my Friday Q and A. So lots of places we can serve you. And if there's something you'd love, we'd love to. We'd love to be able to offer it to you. All right, see you next time. Bye. Foreign.

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