My Doctor Wants Me to Go on a Low Sugar, Low Fat Diet. What Is the Best Way for Me to Address This?

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I just got a call from my primary care physician. My triglycerides are high and my A1C shows that I'm borderline diabetic. She wants me to go on a low sugar, low fat diet. What's the best way for me to address this? 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. Beverly from Facebook asks. I just got a call from my primary care physician. My triglycerides are high. No surprise. I've been fighting that for years. And my hemoglobin A1C shows that I'm borderline diabetic. My doctor wants me to go on a low sugar, low fat diet. What's the best way for me to address this? Well, I just so happen to have written the perfect book for this for you. I will be right back to walk you through the steps. Stay with me.

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All right, so here's the thing. Triglycerides, it's probably not a fat issue unless you're eating inflammatory damaged fats. So if you're getting a lot of Those vegetable oil omega 6s, first of all, stop it. Stop that processed food and those processed oils. The only oils you really want to look at there are doing extra virgin olive oil and a clean avocado oil in place of those. But really where we want to focus, where we really want to hit it hard, is with sugar. And this is why I wrote the Sugar Impact diet. When I wrote the Virgin Diet, the number one question I got asked was sugar. And it seemed like people were either confused about sugar, like it's honey, it's natural, I can eat it, or they were controlled by it, they just couldn't quit it. And one of the things we know with sugar and especially fructose and I'll unpack this is that it will raise your triglycerides, especially fructose. You've got a couple things going on here because you said my triglycerides are high. And we're going to address some things that are going to help get that back into normal range. And you're borderline diabetic. Your hemoglobin A1C is borderline diabetic. So this means that you are insulin resistant.

Right.

Your insulin is no longer responding well to get your blood sugar back into check. And you also have elevated triglycerides. So really what we want to do is start with the foundation of a diet that is going to be super blood sugar balanced, will help balance your blood sugar and restore your insulin sensitivity. There's some supplements and lifestyle that can help there too. Right. And when you do that, that shall pull your triglycerides back into normal range. All right, so let's go through what all that means that you need to do. All right, so here you go. First off, Beverly, sugar impact diet. And what I did was to help people really understand where sugar's sneaking into their diet. Because it's not about eating no sugar. It's about knowing which to choose and which to lose and where it's sneaking in and sneaking into the silliest places. Honestly, a lot of that, um, well, processed foods in general. Like, we're gonna really work on unprocessing your diet. The things that I will use here, so a protein powder shake mix and bars for emergency, but all the rest of that processed food, the cookies and cakes and crackers and, yeah, those gotta go. So big thing there was a lot of the damaged oils and it's high sugar impact. So first we're looking at where all the sugar's sneaking in. Is it in the sauces, this, the dressings and the drinks, which is a lot of where it goes. And are you getting damaged fats in there? We need to get that out. So first we take a sneaky sugar inventory. We find where things are sneaking in, we find out. We do a sugar impact assessment. We find out what's going on with your energy, with your belly fat, with your cravings, with joint pain, with brain fog, bunch of other stuff. Give you an assessment. Then we're going to go through and we're going to go from high sugar impact foods to medium sugar impact foods over a week or two. Because what we want to do is take you from being a sugar burner used to eating sugar carbs all throughout the day. And you might say, oh, I don't eat any sugar. But remember, all carbs except for fiber turn into sugar. It's a matter of you making them slowly from the food you eat, like legumes and wild rice and non starchy vegetables, versus mainlining them from things like fruit juice and white bread and pasta and things like that. So that's the first thing. Then over the course of the next two weeks, this is what's going to really improve your triglyceride levels and your insulin sensitivity. The next two weeks, we take fructose out of your diet altogether. Now, one of the things when you have elevated triglycerides is I take your fruit down to zero to one servings a day. Not that fruit. You know, fruit is not the real bad source of fructose that you're getting from something like agave or crystalline fructose or apple juice concentrate or high fructose corn syrup. But the challenge is, is that there is fructose in fruit and fructose really raises triglycerides. Now the fructose and fruit, as long as you're not doing the juice, the dried fruit, the jams, et cetera, it's a little bit better because it's got the fiber and the nutrients, the phytonutrients in it. But while we're trying to get your triglycerides down, we want to get that really far down as well. So during the two weeks of the virgin diet or the sugar impact diet, we take fructose out altogether. So so that your body gets worse at taking it straight to the liver and turning it into fat. Because the more fructose you eat, the better your body gets at doing that. So during this time we take it out, we get your body back to burning fat as a fuel again, we get you out of snacking, we shorten your feeding window to improve your blood sugar and improve your insulin sensitivity. Because one of the things we know is that if you get yourself down to two to three meals a day, you give yourself a good 12 hour overnight fast and then work into some days doing an eighth, you know, an eight hour time restricted feeding window, that you'll improve your insulin sensitivity, that you'll have better blood sugar balance, your triglycerides will come down. So that is what the sugar impact diet set up to do. Now, key things in there that are super important is that we are focusing on clean protein, healthy fats and lots of fiber from non starchy vegetables and slow low carbs. This improves satiety because the protein and fiber slow down stomach emptying and the fat tells your brain triggers some release of some chemicals in the small intestine. Tell your brain that you've eaten. So all of that together improves, helps with satiety and helps with blood sugar balance. A couple other things will help here too. Lemon juice. If you drink a little like I called a cravings crusher, Lemonade, couple tablespoons of lemon juice with a little bit of little bit, not much, you want to keep the sour, take your sweet tooth away, A little bit of stevia, a little bit of fiber like my extra fiber or some chia or flax before a meal. That will lower your blood sugar response to the meal and also you'll be less hungry for the meal. Cinnamon also lowers your blood sugar response, so it's amazing too. Then we're going to look at some supplements that can help here a ton. Number one, check your vitamin D. That's a 25 hydroxy vitamin D test. You want to optimize your vitamin D to 60 to 80 ngs per ML. Not only is this amazing for immune system which is so, so key critical now, but it's super important for helping with insulin sensitivity. So this is key for that. You want to take a multi that's got chromium, vanadium, magnesium and zinc. You will probably need to take extra magnesium. But these are the four horsemen of blood sugar balance. Super important. Another key nutrient stabilized are lipoic acid. And then fish oil can help re sensitize the insulin receptors. One more part in the diet, vinegar and especially apple cider vinegar or red wine vinegar. But I really love apple cider vinegar because it's more alkalizing, actually can act like the drug metformin. So these vinegars can act like metformin and help improve insulin sensitivity as well. So make sure that you're having a big salad with some lemon juice and vinegar, you know, or lemon juice or vinegar, but I prefer vinegar with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil would be amazing. You can also put a little bit of that apple cider vinegar and some green tea. So that's another way to get it and sneak it in that way. All right. And then here's a couple more things that can be helpful. Exercise is one of the first places that you can start to restore insulin sensitivity in your muscle. And so doing resistance training can help improve insulin sensitivity, which then will help lower your blood sugar. Right. Because your body now can hear insulin doesn't have to pump it up so much, your body will respond better to it. So that's one thing. Sleep is super important. Just one per night of sleep and you're more insulin resistant and you're hungrier. So sleep is super key important as well as managing stress. That can raise your blood sugar too. So all of those things are key. All of that stuff together will have an amazing effect and I would love to hear back from you as to what the result of all of that was. So go to it, Beverly, and let me know. 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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