Our Modern-Day Energy Crisis

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Welcome to the Virgin Diet Lifestyle show with your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin.

One of the top complaints that people go to their doctors for energy. And it's clear from the popularity of Starbucks and 5 Hour Energy and Red Bull that this is definitely an epidemic. Now there are some easy things that you can do to immediately elevate your energy and I'm going to share them with you in the show. So if you're running on low or empty, pick one to start with and then go down the list until you've got them all dialed in and you're going to be blown away by the impact that this is going to have. So the first one and the big question I have, when someone comes to me and says, jj, I'm tired, I need more energy, I go dial it back and let's talk about your sleep. You should be getting seven to nine hours of uninterrupted quality sleep during the normal circadian rhythm every night. You should fall asleep within 30 minutes of going to bed, putting your head on the pillow. And you should wake up without an alarm clock feeling rested. And if you're laughing hysterically at me right now as I'm saying this, we need to work on this. Put this as the number one priority. As I go through the list, I find with so many people, the reason they're not getting good night's sleep is because they just didn't make it important. Do you know failure to get a good night's sleep can make you weight loss resistant even if you're eating well and exercising. But the bottom line is it's gonna make you tired. There's no way you're gonna have great energy during the day if you're not sleeping well at night. So that's step one is to focus on getting good, high quality slee a priority. Now next one, check your thyroid levels. I'm going to do a shout out to my buddy Dr. Alan Christiansen here. If you have a question on that, check him out. But thyroid, little bit low. Thyroid can make a big impact on your energy and what's amazing here is that when you go to a traditional doctor, quite often they're going to tell you your thyroid is in normal ranges. But I want to remind you that normal doesn't equal optimal. And optimal ranges for thyroid is going to be somewhere in the 0.5 to 1 TSH thyroid stimulating hormone range. Unfortunately, the range for normal is as low as 0.1, all the way up to 4.8. And what I've heard from a lot of my functional medicine doctor friends is somewhere over 2 and above, especially with symptoms means you probably need to get your thyroid looked at. So go find someone who's a functional medicine doctor who can look at this with you. And again, you want to look at thyroid stimulating hormone. And also you're going to want to look at something called Free T3. That's how much of the active thyroid in your body that you can actively use. Some other signs of low thyroid besides just being tired is higher cholesterol, your hair falling out, being depressed, not being able to build muscle, lower sex drive, losing the outer third of your eyebrows, inability to lose weight, and a little bit of yellow on your palms because you can't convert your beta carotene. So over to vitamin A. So those are all simple signs of this, of course, constipation, another big one. But again, that's when you want to work with the functional medicine doctor on. Now another one. I want to make sure you're exercising right. I find people seem to do one of two things. They're either not working out, that's not right, or they're overdoing it. Do you know the single most important thing that you need to do with exercise is recover well. So with exercise, one of the things I preach, if you've been in my community at all, is burst training. And I teach you to burst to blast fat, but I'm also going to teach you to burst, to have more overall energy because bursting gives you an endorphin response. Those are those feel good chemicals. And then it also is going to improve insulin sensitivity. So now your body's going to be able to handle sugar better and give you steady, sustained energy. Big important one here. It helps your body handle stress better. And remember, stress can start to impact on thyroid function and really make you tired. Over time, it improves fat burning and you want your body to be able to use fat as fuel. It's going to give you nice, steady, sustained energy and it boosts your metabolism. All right, now my big book out is the Sugar Impact Diet. And one of the things I teach in there is to lower your sugar impact so that you can shift from being a sugar burner to a fat burner. It already sounds better, doesn't it? Because if you're a sugar burner, meaning that you have to eat every two to three hours a little carb hit to keep your blood sugar up, you'll never have great energy. It'll go up and crash and up and crash. When you can use stored fat for fuel and go four to six hours between meals, you're going to have this nice, steady, sustained energy, which is incredible. And you do this again by lowering your sugar impact. Now, another thing going back over to my other book, the virgin diet, is to check for food intolerances. Because if you're eating the wrong foods, and I've seen with so many people, dairy, gluten, soy, corn, peanuts, eggs, can create a firestorm of inflammation and zap your energy. So what I have you do in the virgin diet is pull all seven of those foods and the other one sugar out of your diet for three weeks. And then we take the highest food intolerance food one by one. Gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, and we connect the dots. We have you try the food, see how you feel. So you say, when you're eating it, is this food giving me energy, which is what food should do, or is it zapping me? And you track that over the next step, 72 hours. Because some of these things can take 72 hours before you really feel.

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All right, some simple supplements. Because I get asked all the time, what supplements can I take for energy again? Remember, you want to start with the good building blocks of sleep, sleep well, manage your stress, exercise, eating well. But there are some amazing supplements that can make a big difference. And I'm going to give you a shout out on two that I love. Actually, I'm going to give you just a little vitamin C because it helps handle stress. But then I'm going to really focus on two B vitamins and CoQ10. Now, CoQ10 helps your body generate ATP. This is really the currency of energy for your cells. And turns out no nutrient can replace CoQ10 here. So if you don't have enough, your cells cannot create optimal energy. So that means your cells are going to form pro aging free radicals. If you don't have enough CoQ10, it's going to affect the energy not just in your muscles, but in your heart and your brain and all sorts of other organs. So this is hugely important. And the deal is your body can make CoQ10, but if you have deficiencies in any of the eight nutrients it requires, then you've got a limit in how much it can create. And, and where you really get CoQ10 in your food is in meat. So quite often people are not getting enough CoQ10 from the food they eat. Especially of course, if you're a vegan or a vegetarian, because plant foods don't contain CoQ10. So shout out there, vegans and vegetarians, CoQ10 is one that you want to make sure that you are taking. And of course, stress, which depletes so many things, can also increase your need for CoQ10, as can statin drugs. Clear cut science showing that if you're on a statin drug, you need to be on CoQ10. Hopefully your doctor was smart enough to have you do that. Now, most people can benefit from 100 to 200 milligrams of CoQ10. You want to get a really high quality form of this because it's difficult for your body to absorb. The other one you probably have heard about this one are B vitamins, because B vitamins are depleted during stress and B vitamins have all of these unique benefits that affect energy levels. So just one example here, vitamin B6 helps your body produce serotonin and melatonin which helps you sleep well. So if you're not getting those seven to nine hours of sleep that I talked about, this could be one of the issues. Now B vitamins also help convert food into energy. Important hundreds of reactions that metabolize protein, fat and carbs have to to have B vitamins to do so. And of course stress depletes B vitamins like crazy. And I have yet to find someone who isn't under stress these days. So while taking a B complex isn't going to be a cure all for fatigue or lagging energy levels, supplementing it along with again the other things I've mentioned here, good sleep, managing stress, eating a clean diet, burst training can really help you reverse your energy crisis. Okay, next one, eat by the plate. That means you're going to get at every meal clean, lean protein, healthy fats, loads of non starchy vegetables, slow, low impact carbs. Because this together is going to help create this hormonal symphony where you can use fat for fuel and keep your blood sugar stable, which is totally energizing. If you eat and you're hungry an hour or two later or you feel hugely energetic and then you just crash, you created a problem for yourself. So again, I want you to get a really good visual of that plate. Clean, lean protein, healthy fats, slow, low carbs, lots of non starchy vegetables and just example of healthy fats. Avocado, coconut, raw nuts and seeds, cold water, fish, grass fed beef, protein, cold water fish, grass fed beef, pastured pork and lamb. And then also if you're a vegan vegetarian, pea based and plant based protein shakes and lentils and legumes and quinoa. And I got to do one more little shout out here and this is stress. And I've been kind of hitting on stress all the way along, but boy, one of the things that can really zap your energy is chronic stress. Now of course all of the things I just talked about here, B vitamins, CoQ10, vitamin C, eating well, getting sleep, exercising is going to help your body handle stress better. But I'm going to give you one other thing to think about there. First of all, obviously anything you can remove that's a chronic stressor, get it out. But a lot of times we can't remove those things. But what we can change is our perception. Because when you look at a lot of the research on stress, the perception is really the difference. And so if you can change your perception of that stress, you will be able to handle it better. Now, of course, put all those things in place and it's interesting that the same things that help give you more energy help you handle stress. But I can't really talk about more energy without just throwing that little caveat in there as well. For a picture of the perfect plate and how much of each of the four groups you should be eating and what's in them, text 58885 and enter JJ Energy 1. That's the number one space, your first name space, and your email address. Again, you text a 58885 and you enter JJnergy1. Put a space in your first name, another space, and your email address. In the Sugar Impact Diet, I help you clear up the confusion around sugar and take back the control that sugar has over your life. In just two weeks, you'll lose your sweet tooth and shrink your waistline. Why wait? Start those two weeks today.

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