I've Been Hearing About Carb Cycling. Would You Care to Share the Pros and Cons?

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I've been hearing about Carb Cycling. Would you care to share the pros and cons to this? And if you do it, what is the healthiest amount of time to do it in? 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. Swiss Han from Instagram asks Good morning.

Whenever I hear that, I think Good Morning Vietnam.

Anyway, good morning. I've been hearing about carb cycling. Would you care to share the pros and cons to this? And if you do, what is the healthiest amount of time to do it in? All right, I'm going to give you a high level on this. I'll be right back with that answer.

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Okay, so let's talk about diets and cycling in general. So here's the thing. In exercise, what do we know? We know that you're supposed to cross train. In fact, I have a fast fitness program and in there I teach you to move more, like walk more often, get a dog and then to do high intensity interval training, some cardio burst training, and then do some resistance training and then do some flexibility and cross train it. Always switch it up because your body is built to adapt. Ditto with your diet. And what I want you to really think about with your diet is that you want to be metabolically flexible. What does that mean? Well, in the sugar impact diet, I talk about being a sugar burner versus a fat burner. You don't want to be a sugar burner. You know you're a sugar burner if you lose weight, but you don't lose your waste, that's making you worse, not better, by the way. You don't want that. And if you can't go more than two to three hours without getting that term that they made that hangry term. So you've never ever just forgotten to eat. In fact, that's the sign that you're a fat burner is you can easily go hours without eating. You actually sometimes will go, God, should I eat lunch? That's one. And you lose weight off your waist. And so obviously you don't want to be the sugar burner. In fact, what you really want to be is, is able to burn sugar, able to burn fat and able to burn ketones and be able to cycle back and forth so that depending on where you are in your cycle, if you're a cycling female or what you're doing with your exercise, you can bring the carbohydrates up or you can move into more of a ketogenic low carb diet and your body can easily shift back enforce. So I want us to really rethink this in that we want to cross train our diet. Now this is important because like where ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting can be Therapeutic, and especially when you look at like more extended fasting, can be therapeutic for anti aging, for stimulating stem cells, for immune health, for getting blood sugar balance. If you do it longer term, same with too much keto. Do keto longer term, especially for women. In some women, this could create some stress responses and can actually start to mess up your periods. It can start to mess up your adrenals and your cortisol. So that's what you want to think of. And that's why I really like the idea of cycling your diet. Because if you think about it like that's what we would naturally do. If this was a thousand years ago, we would have had more fruit during the summer, not really in the winter. So we would have eaten more of that, gained some weight, by the way, the days would have been longer, but we would have been staying up later. We would have been more insulin resistant. We would have stored more fat so that during the winter when we didn't have access to that and we were eating more things like pemmican and fats and going into ketosis, we could use that stored body fat for fuel. So we naturally are supposed to cycle. We're supposed to be able to miss meals and not have it be a total crisis, right? To be able to fast for a day, to be able to switch and, you know, go high carb or low carb and be able to be metabolically flexible with like that. So there's no golden rule for how much is the right amount. It's really getting to know your body. And this is why it's so important to step on a scale every single day. The scale is not the judge of you. It's not telling you if you're good or bad. It's telling you what happened with what you did yesterday and how that's making your body respond. Is it inflamed, you know, is it dehydrated? What's going on with it? That's where a body fat scale is important there too. This is not emotional, it's not judgmental. We're just trying to figure out how our personal metabolic machine works so that you know what's best for you. More on that coming up as I get ready to Launch Virgin Diet 2.0. I'm deep in the works of that, so we'll be talking a lot more about this, but thanks for that question. And the big takeaway from this is let's think about cross training your diet like you cross train your exercise. 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 subscribetoj.com.

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