Quarantine 15 Diet Takeover Week Day 5: Exercise

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I've gained the quarantine 15 help. Any advice? 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. Marcy12 from Instagram says JJ, I've gained the quarantine 15 and more and I'm really struggling to get back to my pre quarantine weight. Any advice? Hey JJ here and I am fascinated by weight loss, resistance, everything that can get in the way of you losing weight and cause you to gain weight. And I believe that with quarantine 15 there are a variety of reasons that you could be struggling and I'm going to cover this question. I can't just answer this question in one answer, so I'm taking it over. All week you're going to be hearing me address this, so stay tuned. I'll be right back with the answer.

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All right, it's the last day of the quarantine 15 diet takeover week. This week we are talking about exercise because again, when they were looking at, you know, why are people gaining weight during the pandemic? What's going on? And one of the big things that came out were that, you know, it was stress eating, more drinking and lack of exercise. And, you know, I know for a lot of people, they're used to walking all over the place, they're used to going to the gym, and all of a sudden it's like, shut down. Now here's where we're lucky. We are so lucky that now there's so many opportunities online to be able to work out and even if it's just with your own body weight in a very small space. So the first thing that I want you to think about is if your gym is still closed, if you're not able to move around much, you know, we got to figure out how to be able to do it. And it's one of the things that I've worked on my whole adult life because I travel so much and just never know what you're getting into when you travel in terms of what you're going to have access to. So I've learned to be able to make, make a gym out of just about anything anywhere. But why is exercise so important? I always say that if you want to start to lose weight, the, the first thing you really want to focus on is diet. It's the one that makes the big, big shift. It's the biggest initial shift. But then if you want to keep that weight off long term, you've got exercise involved. Because if you do not have exercise involved, you are could end up being tofi thin outside fat inside. Exercise is really important for what I call changing your body's interest rate. When you exercise, you do a couple different things. You get your body's fat burning enzymes revved up. You deplete glycogen the muscle stores of carbohydrates, um, they're like your energy stores and your muscles so that you have a place to put carbohydrates when you eat them. Again, you improve insulin sensitivity. So your body has lower insulin responses to food, to the blood sugar response to food. Because your body can hear it well, it's more sensitive to the message. So you don't have those bigger insulin responses that are, have insulin up higher for longer, which locks the doors to fat cells so you can't afford, can't burn off stored fat for fuel. So insulin sensitivity is super duper important. And of course, high intensity interval training, or burst training, which is a key part of my fitness regimen, teaches your body how to handle stress and recover. But it also raises growth hormone, it gets your body to have to expend more calories recovering from the oxygen debt you create, and it also helps you burn more fat afterwards because of all the oxygen debt you're creating during the exercise. Now, along with that is resistance training. And resistance training is another one super key here because it helps you build muscle and muscle requires more energy to stay on your body. Your body has to do a lot of work to repair and keep that muscle in place. So it helps your basal metabolic rate. So hiit training or high intensity interval training is going to help you have a better metabolic rate during and after the workout and a lot longer after the workout than say if you just went for a walk. Not saying don't walk. I think that's a big key part of moving more is just moving more throughout the day. But you gotta put in some hiit training and to get that metabolic rate pushed up. And then you want to do the resistance training to have a better metabolic rate all day long. Plus bonus points, that helps with insulin sensitivity and it helps you build better bones as well. So what we should be doing here that's super important during this time and all the time is make sure that you're not just tracking your weight, you're making sure you're also tracking and what your weight is made up of. So two things to look at there is doing a waist hip measurement. Key point here is if you're seeing that over the pandemic or any time you're gaining the majority of your weight around your waist, that's when you got to go, what the heck is going on? Is this stress cortisol's happening? Is there something going on with my insulin? Do I have something going on with my gut microbiome? What is going on here. That's making my waist increase more than anything else. And you want to monitor your body fat. If you find that during this time your weight's gone up a little bit, but your clothing size gone has gone up a lot more, you just got fluffier, you probably gained more body fat, which weighs less than muscle mass. So we want to make sure that as you're tracking your weight, you're tracking what that weight is made up of and you're moving to having lower body fat and higher lean body mass because that is better for your overall long term health.

There you go.

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 subscribetojay.com.

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