Overcoming Weight Loss Resistance

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With your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin. Why can't I lose weight? I'm eating healthy, I'm exercising, and the skin scale isn't budging. Or worse yet, I'm working so hard at this and I'm gaining weight. Seriously, can you relate? If so, today's show on weight loss resistance is just for you. I'm going to explain what weight loss resistance is and the seven factors of weight loss resistance that can make it hard, if not flat out impossible, for you to lose the weight. So weight loss resistance is the inability to lose weight despite eating healthily and exercising. Now, this could be due to the simple fact you've been following the wrong set of rules. In other words, treating your body like a bank account and hopelessly counting calories rather than seeing it as the chemistry lab that it is. So if you're listening to this and you haven't done the Virgin diet yet, that's step one. The virgin diet is going to address many of these weight loss resistance factors, but you may need some extra help or extra time to heal your metabolism so that you can easily burn fat for energy. So now I'm going to go through these seven factors with you and I'm going to jump in and start with what I like to call thyroid fatigue. Because there's a lot of people out there that don't have outright thyroid disease, but their thyroid is sluggish. And I want to give you a little heads up on this. Thyroid is really your master gland, your master switch for your metabolism. If your thyroid isn't working well, nothing's working well. You're not going to be able to build muscle. You're going to have a slower metabolism. And some of the signs of this would be elevated cholesterol levels, losing the outer third of your eyebrows, being cold all the time, being constipated, not being able to lose weight, lowered sex drive. Did I say you can't build your muscle? And slight yellow tinge to your skin if you're Eating a lot of foods with beta carotene because you can't convert that beta carotene over to vitamin A. So those are some of the symptoms. And thyroid disease is epidemic in this country, but one of the reasons it's not being identified is because we're using the wrong darn markers. We're not really looking where we should. First off, remember, when you're looking at a lab test, we're looking at average people. Do you want to be average? You don't want to be average. So the average person's overweight and sick. So those are the markers we're looking at to decide our levels. So when you look at thyroid, the thyroid stimulating hormone, or TSH, you really want to have that between 0.5 and 2. Okay. And ideally right around 1. And then you also want to look at a marker called Free T3. This is the active thyroid hormone in your body. And then you also want to look at antibodies, because one of the classic problems with thyroid is autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's disease. So you'll see that by looking at your antibodies. And quite often you won't see a big jump in your numbers on your test, but you'll see all those symptoms that can be resolved by. By treating your thyroid. Now, besides looking at taking a natural thyroid glandular replacement, the other things that you can look at are gluten issues, soy. Soy can lower thyroid function, gluten can lower thyroid function, and so can heavy metal. So these are other issues that you want to look at. I'm going to give a shout out here to my buddy, Dr. Alan Christensen. Dr. Alan Christiansen is really my go to guy on thyroid. So if you have any issues there, go check him out. He's got the idiot's guide to thyroid disease. All right, Insulin. So I'm gonna put insulin resistance and leptin resistance together because so often I see these two go hand in hand. So what's going on here? You eat something, your blood sugar goes up, your body goes, okay, we don't wanna have high blood sugar. So it raises insulin in response to that to help bring blood sugar to normal levels and move that sugar into the cells where it can be used. That's if things are going well. However, if you're eating a high carb diet, a high sugar impact diet, you start to perturb this and you keep your. Where you're snacking all the time, shout out for no snacking. You keep blood sugar up, and every time you eat, your insulin comes up and it doesn't get back down to fasting levels. If you're snacking all the time, your body is getting a barrage of insulin attacks, and the receptors get fatigued. And so in order for them to respond, they have to keep having higher and higher levels of insulin. And so you become insulin resistant and you have elevated insulin. And when you have elevated insulin, you basically lock the doors to the fat cells so you can't use fat for fuel, and you create inflammation. Now, the other thing here is leptin. And leptin is what we use for our body to go, okay, you've eaten. You don't need to eat anymore. When you raise insulin, you also raise leptin. This should be good. But it turns out that people who are overweight or obese have higher levels of leptin, yet they're still hungry. Why? Because just like being insulin resistant, you can be leptin resistant. And when you're leptin resistant, you have the high levels, but they're not doing anything because you can't hear them, so they're not shutting down your appetite. Now, good news for restoring insulin Leptin resistance is. I can say that word resistance is working out, especially weight training. A great night's sleep, boy. One poor night of sleep. And we'll talk about this next. Can make you more insulin and leptin resistant. One poor sleep, night of sleep. And most people are having those challenges chronically. And then fish oil is great for helping restore receptor sensitivity. Vitamin D is huge here, too. One way you can see if these are issues for you is ask your doctor to do a lab test where you look at fasting glucose, fasting insulin, hemoglobin A1C, A25 hydroxy vitamin D level is critical. And then a cholesterol triglyceride ratio. Okay, so those are some things to look at there, Cortisol. And when I look at cortisol, I'm looking at stress and sleep. Because if you're chronically stressed, I'm not talking acute stress. That's not what most of us have problems with. Most of us have problems with chronic stress. What happens over time with chronic stress is your cortisol's up, elevated, which means higher blood sugar. Higher blood sugar means creating insulin resistance. Both of those store more fat around your waist. This becomes your stress belly. Okay? Higher cortisol also makes you have lower serotonin and dopamine. That makes you crave more sweets and hungrier overall. It also lowers stomach acid so that you can't digest and break down your proteins as well, and it makes your gut more permeable so that then those poorly digested proteins or undigested proteins hit your small intestine, it's more permeable and they launch out into general circulation and create food intolerance. And that's a whole nother issue. That's the Virgin diet.

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So stress on its own can make you fat, age faster and tired. But sleep is a big form of stress. Now we know if you're stressed, you're not going to sleep well because serotonin, which you need to trigger melatonin to help you sleep, tends to be low because stress is high. So that's one issue with it. But one poor night of sleep, your stress hormones are higher and you're more insulin resistant. And for most people, it's not one poor night of sleep. It becomes more chronic. In fact, University of Chicago I believe it was found that even if you're eating right and exercising, failure to get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep, and you've got your perfect number in there, failure to get that sets you up for obesity. If I had to pick one takeaway here, one takeaway, you know, people are going to think, oh, it's to pull the seven foods. No, if I had to pick one takeaway for you, it would be to sleep, to make your number one priority, to get a good night's sleep. All right, now, as you can tell, I could go on and on about every single one of these subjects. But today's episode, today's show is really to just make you aware of these different things that can get in the way of you being able to lose weight. And the next one is toxicity. So we detoxify every day. That's why some of these detox programs make me crazy, because you need to be doing this on a regular basis. And we're confronted with toxins every day. One of the biggest places we get toxins, obviously, is in what we eat or drink, but also the air we breathe and then all the substances around us, everything from the dry cleaning to our home cleaning products. So our body has to deal with these things and detoxify these on a regular basis. Now, things that can help there is getting clean, lean protein in. The idea of using a juice cleanse to detoxify is to silly because if you don't have protein, you can't get the toxins out of your body. You know, there's two phases that are critical to detoxing. Number one is to free them up, and number two is to get them out. And the way you escort the toxins out of your body is you take protein, it grabs onto the toxin and it gets it out. So one of the things I see with these juice cleanses is they free up those stored toxins in your body, but they don't get them out. So every day we're getting confronted with toxins, and ideally they're coming in and they're going out. But if you overburden your system or you're a poor detoxifier, your body is going to store these toxins and they love fat. So where they tend to store is in your neurological system and in your fat tissue, because your neurological system is fat. So you store these things and your body, in an effort to protect you, slows down your metabolism and holds on to fat. And it's one of the reasons that you need to think about as you're losing fat that you need to be making sure that you're doing things that help you detoxify so you're eliminating these toxins. You don't want to just start to burn fat and release these toxins and then not get them out. So how can you do that? Green drinks are huge loads of non starchy vegetables, antioxidants, green plants, fiber, lots of water, sweating, dry brushing, Epsom salts baths, far infrared sauna and some lymphatic drainage massage. Those are some good places to start. But again, this is really alerting you to all of these areas of weight loss resistance. And understand that if you're toxic, it's going to slow down your metabolism and make you hold on to fat. And it's a major hormone disruptor. So it can make you more have thyroid problems, it can make you more insulin resistant, it can make you have sex hormone imbalances. All right, let's go on to GI gastrointestinal issues. Now, of course, the virgin diet is all about food intolerance. So you know about that if you've been following me at all. And the next one is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And I want you to think of this as endotoxic toxins that your body is producing. So if you're eating high sugar diet, processed carbohydrates, taking some of the medications that kill off the good, I can say this good gut bacteria, artificial sweeteners, gluten, if you're feeding any of that bad bacteria, you actually will extract more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. Another one is Candida. And Candida, if you're doing birth control pills, again, some of the antibiotics out there and a high sugar diet, high processed carb diet, you can feed Candida that's going to make you crave more carbs, make you tired, make you gain weight or low stomach acid. And we know that stress and aging, lower stomach acid. Well now you're not going to be able to break down your proteins as well that can lead to food intolerance. But also you just won't be able to have the nutrients you need for your metabolism. So I tell people if you're 30 or older or under any stress, and I'm still trying to find the person who's not under any stress. Where are you then? Do yourself a favor and do a trial of digestive enzymes, especially for fat and protein. Those are the two that I see people having challenges with. Okay, so genetics and epigenetics, because you've got to look not just at genes. Yes, genes play a role, but we like to say that genes load the gun and lifestyle pulls the trigger, or lifestyle affects what your gene expression is, which is your epigenetics. So it's obvious when you look at the increased rates of obesity that it's not genetics. And I want you to take that and go, phew. Because you might be tempted to go, you know what, there's nothing I could do here. My whole family is overweight. But you know what? That's not your destiny. You can change that. Yes, you can't change your genes, but you can change the way your genes express or talk about things. So lifestyle becomes really critical here and you may have to work harder, but you know, everyone's got something, okay? And then sex hormone imbalances. So testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, dhea, but especially testosterone, estrogen, progesterone. You know, as we're aging especially or under stress. If you're under stress, you might find that you lose your progesterone into your testosterone. If you're eating, say, a lot of soy, you might lower your testosterone and raise your estrogen. It's the imbalance, whether you're a man or a woman, that can make it hard for you to put on muscle, make you lose your libido, make you depressed. I mean, estrogen for women and testosterone for men are basically natural antidepressants and make you better at storing fat. So if you're finding that you've got a sex hormone imbalance, again, you've lost your libido, you can't put on muscle, you're PMSY for a woman, you're depressed. If you're a man or a woman, which is also a sign of thyroid fatigue, go and get your your hormone levels tested. And I'm going to give a shout out to my girlfriend, Dr. Sarah Gottfried with the Hormone Cure. This is a great book to really help you with the foundation of how to balance your hormones naturally. And some of those things you want to do, even if you do have to do bioidentical hormone replacement, the things you want to do first so that you can use the least amount possible. I've given you some basic ways to self identify if some of these issues could be creating weight loss resistance for you. And I've also included a comprehensive assessment with today's show transcript. You can get these free by texting 58885 and entering WLR. Your first name and your email address. Again, the number is 58885. And then you enter WLR space, your first name space, and your email address. In the Virgin Diet I have you swap seven foods for three weeks to uncover your hidden food intolerance and so that you can finally lose the weight and feel better fast. Why wait? Start those three weeks today. Hey everyone, did you like this episode? Be sure to subscribe for the next one and tell a friend. If you'd like world class training and cutting edge information, visit thevirgindiet.com.

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