Six Simple Strategies for Fast, Lasting Fat Loss

Hey, it's J.J. here.

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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.

In today's show, I'm going to share my favorite tips on how to lose weight fast, and more importantly, not just weight, but fat. And I'm betting that most of these things are things you've never heard of, or if you have, you weren't really sure how to use them most effectively. But you will now. And this is part one of a two part series because I wanted to make sure you have a toolbox full of tips to help you lose weight fast and break through those weight loss plateaus. And by the way, you really want to lose weight fast because the studies show when you lose weight fast, you actually lose more weight and that weight becomes permanent weight loss. Yay. So let's dive in. Number one, eat a protein rich, substantial breakfast. Here's where the research shows that when you eat a substantial breakfast with good quality protein, you eat less overall for the whole day. Now that's going to lead me straight into number two, because the next research study shows that when you replace a meal a day or two with a meal replacement shake, you also lose more weight and keep it off. So I look at this and I go, all right, how do we put those two together for even more power? Well, you can put together a substantial breakfast, protein rich breakfast and a shake all in one. Right? Because we're going to have a protein rich meal replacement shake. So you start with a high quality protein powder and then you're going to put in some healthy fats like coconut milk or almond milk and some freshly ground flaxseed meal and add in some slow low carbs like some berries and some spinach. And now all of a sudden you've got the perfect substantial protein rich meal. And why that works so well? Well, protein is very satiating and also very thermic. It boosts your metabolism. Okay, so it's going to help you feel fuller, longer. When you put protein and fiber together, you slow down stomach emptying. And this is critical because it suppresses a hormone in your stomach called ghrelin that when it's high, tells you that you're hungry. And then fat has a couple different things. If you use coconut milk in your shake, coconut milk has a special type of fat called mcts that actually help you burn more fat. But we also know that fat works in the small intestines to tell your brain that you're full. And then of course, those slow, low carbs keep a steady, nice supply of glucose going to your brain so you don't get cranky and experience that mid morning donut run crash. Okay, so there's number one and two. I put them together. Number three, don't go chowing down before bed. I've actually seen some diet books that tell you to have an evening snack before bed. That couldn't be more wrong. There was a study in cell metabolism that found that mice limited to eating during an eight hour period are healthier than mice that eat freely throughout the day. And that was irregardless of what they ate. And the way you're going to use this approach is eat dinner and then shut the kitchen, lock it down. As one of my clients says, I locked it down. I'm like, good, because then you can create a nice fasting time period of 12 to 14 hours. So remember, you don't want to eat right before bed, and you want to do that to create that fast. But also if you eat right before bed and your stomach's full, remember I talked about suppressing ghrelin a little earlier? Remember, it's a little quiz. Well, if you eat, you keep ghrelin suppressed. You want ghrelin to be high while you're sleeping because it triggers the response of growth hormones. So now you're repairing and rebuilding as you sleep, which is what you should be doing while you're sleeping, not digesting. All right, Next 1, number 4, find the hidden sugars and lower your sugar impact. Okay, so I'm going to do a couple shout outs here. We talk about finding the hidden sugars. Now, you know if you're adding sugar into your coffee, but what you might not think about is that yogurt you're having with your coffee or that muffin is loaded with, with sugar. And quite often it's loaded with something like fruit juice concentrate, which is the worst sugar of all because it's higher in fructose. So I get this question all the time. Well, what about honey? What about agave? They're natural, right? Well, I want you to realize that all sugar is natural, really, unless it's artificial. I'm going to put those over there. We'll talk about that in a bit. So all sugar is natural, but there's. And all sugars are really going to do the same thing. Raise insulin, which then tells your body to store fat, except for one, and that's fructose. All sugar is going to turn into glucose. Raise blood sugar, tell your body, store fat, except for fructose. It doesn't do that, which is why we thought it was great. Hey, it's great. It doesn't raise blood sugar. That's good and bad. It doesn't raise blood sugar. And when you raise blood sugar and raise insulin, you trigger leptin and ghrelin. And the whole message to your body when you do that is, hey, I've eaten. I'm not hungry. Fructose doesn't do that. It goes straight to the liver. It doesn't raise blood sugar. It doesn't tell you you've eaten, you're still hungry. It goes straight to the liver. And you know what it does? It starts making fat.

Hey, J.J. virgin here. Okay, real talk.

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Now, if you eat glucose and fructose together, fruit, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate being the worst because fruit at least has the fiber to slow it down. Fruit juice concentrate and fruit juice are just concentrated fructose and glucose. The glucose now has insulin up. It's telling your body to store fat. Fructose went to your liver. It's telling your body to make fat. Make fat, store fat. Don't be full. You're still hungry. See how problematic that is? So we want to watch those hidden sugars because again, you're probably fairly sophisticated. You're listening to this podcast or you're watching it or reading it. So we know that you're sophisticated, right? And you've been paying attention. But you may not realize that something could say no added sugar and have fruit juice concentrate in it. Or that little muffin that says healthy morning muffin has actually got the same amount of sugar as two Hostess cupcakes. So it's really the hidden sugars, the sneaky sugars that are causing the problems. And don't think that the ants are artificial sweeteners, because they're not. Do you know a recent study showed that people who drink a diet soda a day actually have a higher waist circumference than those who drink a regular soda. We know that when you eat sweet, you crave sweet. And artificial sweeteners are 300 times sweeter than regular sugar is. Also, those sweeteners, those artificial sweeteners can feed the bad bacteria in your gut. And that makes you extract more calories from the food you eat and store it as fat. And those artificial sweeteners can actually raise insulin. And again, we know that that makes you store fat. One more thing there. Whether it's an artificial sweetener or it's a sugar, don't drink your sugar. This makes it even worse. You know, the soda, the juice, the only exception there are shakes because they've got fiber and protein in them. But if you're drinking just straight sugar, it's going straight in fast. All right, number five, burst to blast fat. I'm going to tell you when I want you to burst the most. But first let me tell you a little bit about what I mean by bursting. So bursting, also known as high intensity interval training, is where you can get a great cardio fat burning workout in, in minutes. So if you've been saying, oh, I can't work out, I don't have enough time, bursting is for you. What you do is you start out, I'm going to take, let's say you normally go for a walk, go out, walk for a couple minutes, then you're going to go as hard and fast as you can, whether that's a sprint or a jog or whatever it is, whatever you can do for 30 to 60 seconds, but no longer till you're totally out of breath and then walk it off for twice as long and then do it again and then walk it off to accumulate four to eight total minutes of bursting in 30 to 60 second increments. Now, what I really want you to do is I want you to do this three days a week and ideally, do it first thing in the morning when you wake up on an empty stomach. Just go out there and burst. I'll tell you what I do. I have an exciser at home. An exciser is a nice little portable stair stepper so you can like stumble on in, have your morning espresso, I just gave my secret away. And then jump on that exciser and burst for 30 seconds and then walk around for a minute and burst for 30 seconds. Turn on the morning news. Whatever you do in the morning, you can just throw that into your morning routine. You didn't even have to leave the house or get out of your jammies. But when you burst in the morning, you're going to burn off fat. Storing enzymes boost your metabolism and create this oxygen debt that's going to help you burn more fat throughout the day. Makes you have to recover more so your metabolism is raised. So it's a great way to start the day. All right, the last one for today is number six, and that's vary your calories. You've heard of intermittent fasting. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that alternating days of higher calorie intake with lower calorie intake, and that again is called intermittent fasting, can work just as well as dieting for fat loss. Now, I'm not really a fan of intermittent fasting because what I see is people pig out, then starve themselves. So what I'm going to do is give you a better way to do this, and that is that you shouldn't be eating the same amount of calories every single day. I call it caloric variability. And the easiest way to do this is a couple times a week, maybe two or three times a week, maybe one day a week. Just take your higher starchier carbs, so things like quinoa pasta or lentils or black beans or brown rice and replace them with non starchy vegetables. And that's an easy way to lower that caloric load to switch the calories up. And for me, it's not about lowering calories, it's about shifting things up. Just like we have you do an exercise, your body never really adjusts what's going on, it's not sure what's coming. And if you think about 10,000 years ago, that's really much more what we were doing. Now I've got more tips than this, but this was a start of great tips to put in your toolbox. Here's the thing, don't go tomorrow and go I'm going to do all of them tomorrow. Pick one, start there and then just keep adding them in. Whether you need it to just help speed up that weight loss or you want to break through a plateau. If you'd like a free transcript of today's show, all you need to do is text 58885 and enter fast one that's fast in the number one. Then put a little space, your first name, another space, and your email address and again you're going to text it to 58885 and enter fast1space, your first name space and your email address. In the Virgin Diet, I have you swap seven foods for three three weeks to uncover your hidden food intolerances 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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