Quarantine 15 Diet Takeover Week Day 4: The Gut

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Learn more@mcafee.com online protection 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 this. So stay tuned. I'll be right back with the answer.

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All right, this is the week that I'm taking over with talk about the quarantine 15 weight gain and what you can do about it. It's not one simple single answer. So this is actually answer number four. We've talked about stress, we've talked about comfort food eating and that your body's not a bank accounts of chemistry lab. We've talked about alcohol. Today we're talking about your gut. Now I've already mentioned that stress can make your gut leakier. And if your gut's leakier, the big challenge with that is that you are going to start to react to foods. So here's how this works. You get under stress and when you're under stress, you have lower stomach acid. You don't break down your food as well. Your gut gets more leaky and your food can get out undigested. Food particles can get out into circulation. Your body launches an immune attack, creates some low grade inflammation. And first of all, we do not want our immune system working overtime on anything right now. We want our immune system ready, vigilant if we need it, right? Not dealing with the fact that you ate a pizza. So this is really important as we don't want to get into that situation. But leaky gut inflammation actually is its own risk factor for weight gain. So that's a problem. Plus the fact that these food intolerances can make you crave the very foods that are hurting you and make you hold on to this inflammation. So this is problematic. Second thing is with any kind of different gut or stress stuff, you also can start to disrupt the gut microbiome. Of course, if you're eating more sugar, if you're eating processed foods, if you're eating artificial sweeteners, you can start to do this as well. So all of a sudden, you start to get some candida that will make you crave sugar and carbs, or you might get small intestinal bacterial overgr growth. And then all of a sudden, you're barely eating, but you're bloated all the time and gaining weight. And maybe you've shifted your gut microbiome and you've got more of the bad bacteria that literally extract more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. So you're like going, wait a minute, I'm eating less and gaining more weight. Yes, this can totally happen. And I gave a little takeaway earlier that my weight started going up really quickly. The first week of this, I got super stressed, and then I kind of, like, was like, I know what's going on. Like, go back to your tools. Come on. But one of the things that happened through this is I messed up my gut microbiome a little bit, and I started to gain weight again. And so then I was like, all right, I know what's going on here, and been fixing that. So you may find if you're starting to gain weight, even with eating less and exercising more and doing good sleep, and you're like, what the heck just happened here? Well, you can look and go, could this be hormonal? Or you can look and go, is there something going on with my gut? Big takeaways, gassy, bloated. Whether you eat or not, gaining weight, even if you're eating very little, are big takeaways for that that you might need to go back in there and balance your gut microbiome so that your body is able to go back to, you know, burning off calories, burning off fat like it should. All right, that's the gut one, and we've got one more coming up tomorrow. 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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