Quarantine 15 Diet Takeover Week Day 3: Comfort Food

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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 Fam. 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, this is my takeover week talking about the quarantine 15. What's happened if you've gained it? What to do if what you normally do is not working? What are all the reasons you could have gained the weight? And the next one I'm going to talk about is comfort food. Now, this is super duper important. And I still remember way back when, when I was first starting out, and it's what got me obsessed with weight loss resistance and looking at all the things that could get you to gain weight or make you unable to lose weight. And it became super clear super quick that our body is not a bank account. It's not calories in, calories out. All calories are not created equal. Right. It's a chemistry lab. And what you eat, when you eat, how you eat it, are going to impact the hormones in your body that either tell your body to store fat or burn it, have great, steady, sustained energy or crash and burn. And so I guess I'm assuming you and I both want to have great, steady, sustained energy. We want to easily access stored body fat for fuel. We want to be able to go hours without needing to eat. You know, and that's how you really tell if you're a sugar burner or a fat burn. If you're like, can't go more than two to three hours without crashing and need to eat, that is a problem. Now, one of the first things that happened as the quarantine started to take over and people were stocking up, I was stocking up on wild fish, my buddies of vital choice, and pastured pork and chicken from my buddies over at Butcherbox. Okay, I did store stock up on some dry farm wines, but I was stocking up on the veggies and the protein and all my bars and shakes. But I read, and I still remember the headline it was like, forget kale and quinoa, we're going for chips and Oreos and Spam. I will tell you, my husband did, bizarrely I found a box of Spam he put in the garage. He is the ultimate survivalist. Anyway, this is a problem because these things, it's funny how we tend to reach for these things we consider to be comfort foods that are highly processed, high carbs, high sugar. But they do have an or you know, an opiate like effect on the brain. We know that from the sugars, the gluten, the dairy. They do have, you know, they, they are little drugs for our brain. So that's why we go for that comfort food. So it's really important as you're looking through this to realize that, you know, what you eat matters. So again, I always teach people to eat by the plate and that means some clean protein, a moderate amount. I like what Dr. Mark Hyman says about condomin, not condiment, condomites, right? So a moderate amount of protein loads lots, a lot, lot of non starchy veggies. We stocked our pantry up quickly with broccoli, rice and cauliflower, rice or freezer rather, that would be gross in the pantry just in case we couldn't get fresh. And then a little bit of slow low carbs. Those two together give us lots of fiber and then some healthy fats, you know, like avocados and nuts and seeds. So that, and we've been talk about forever in this community eating that way and then making sure that you're having, you know, two to three meals a day or two meals and a snack. You are not having breakfast, a snack, lunch, a snack, dinner, a snack, because you shouldn't go to bed hungry. Like we are just eating every four to six hours, giving our body time to have our insulin levels return back to resting or fasting levels, giving our body a chance to access stored fat for fuel. So we're looking at eating, you know, moderate portions, drinking a lot of good fluids in between meals, like iced green tea, which helps heal your gut, microbiome, sparkling water, things like that. And then eating, stop eating three to four hours before bed and ideally starting to compress that eating window down to, you know, at least 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. But if you can go longer to more like a 14 to 16 hour fast couple days a week, great. The only exception would be if you've got big adrenal problems, you'll probably want to eat breakfast a little earlier. But again, you're still going to be stretching out between meals. And don't get into that eating every couple hours. That keeps your blood sugar up. It keeps your insulin up. It shuts the doors to those fat stores so they can't burn off stored fat. Who wants that? This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. 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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