Sleep: The Missing Link with JJ Virgin

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of Famer and four time New York Times bestselling author JJ Virgin. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Love Whoa, whoa, whoa.

This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Hey, it's JJ and welcome to the podcast. Today is kind of a rant podcast. I've decided that I'm going to start doing podcasts with featuring me without a guest where I can just rant on the subject. And this is a subject that is so super critical. Critical for us to be talking about. Because here's the deal. What I'm going to be talking about today is the number one thing that you may be blowing off. Thinking is not that important. That can be setting you up to fail on your diet, can make you hungrier, can make your blood sugar unstable, can make you more insulin resistant. And you know what's so cool about this thing I'm going to be sharing with you today? It is the single most important thing you can do for your health. And it's free. All right, today we're going to be talking about sleep. Why you need to be getting more of it, how it is the single most important thing that you can do for your health. Yes, I'm going to be ranting away on it. And here's the deal. All of this is in the show notes and I put a lot of super cool in the show things in the show notes today I've got a great tip sheet on sleep in the show notes. I've got my favorite sleep candy product that I developed to help you fall asleep and stay asleep. I've got resources like my amazing Samina Bed, so lots of cool stuff there. You're going to want to go to jjvirgin.com sleep podcast and let's dive in to today's rant. And again, today's rant is all about sleep. Now I've been working in what I call weight loss resistance for 25 plus years. I used to go around the country training doctors on my course, looking at all the different things that could get in the way of you losing weight or cause you to gain weight. And one of the key things that I realized early on is that if you are not getting the recommended and they say seven to nine hours, I'm sorry, I'm saying eight to nine hours of sleep every single night. High quality sleep. You are set up, my friend, to be hungrier and not for salmon and broccoli. Let's be real, let's be honest, to be crabbier, to crave sugar, to have less energy so your workouts start to suffer, you become more insulin resistant, your blood sugar is more unstable and starts to, you know, that can lead to diabetes and heart disease. In fact, some of the latest research is showing that if you're getting six hours of sleep a night, you're set up for heart disease. And what was crazy when I used to see a lot of people one on one was I literally, and I worked in la, I worked in Hollywood, and I literally had clients who said, no, I can only get five to six hours of sleep. That's it. And so, and I was like, well, then there's nothing we're going to be able to do here. I have one client right now who goes to bed between 3 and 4am and is eating perfectly, exercising. And I'm like, it's not going to work, honey. Because not only is it getting eight to nine hours of sleep, it's also during the normal circadian rhythm. And so even if you're a night owl, you're still going to have to work within that, right? And even if you're an early bird, you can't get up too early. So ideally you're waking up between 6 and 7am, you're going to bed somewhere between 9 and 11pm and, and again, if you're not getting a good night's sleep and what counts as a good night's sleep, and we'll put the sleep quiz into the show notes again. Those are jjvirgin.com sleep podcast. You should be falling asleep within 30 minutes of getting to bed. You should stay asleep throughout the night. You should wake up without an alarm feeling rested. You shouldn't feel like in the middle of the afternoon you're going to feel need a nap. That's it. Those are the simple things. Now if you heard that and thought this woman is crazy, we've got some work to do. But I'm going to give you my special tips today as to how you can help fall asleep and stay asleep. And here's the cool thing with all of this is this is one of the single things that so quickly can change your weight, change your appetite, change your cravings. In fact, when I met my husband, he was a six hour night sleeper. I'm like, this will not do. As we started to get him to sleep eight to nine hours, he couldn't keep the weight on. In fact, Dr. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor, did a little study with Glamour magazine. They took 10 people, they didn't change the diet. All they did was get them to sleep eight to nine hours and they all lost weight. So this is very, very significant. A couple different things. When you're not getting good sleep, your cortisol is higher. When your cortisol is higher, you're more likely to have food intolerances. You're more likely to have unstable blood sugar. You're breaking down muscle, it can disrupt your thyroid function. Lower serotonin and dopamine makes you crave sugar, makes you hungrier. Just one poor night's sleep, you're more insulin resistant. Your body doesn't hear insulin as well. That means if you're eating carbohydrates, your body's pumping out more insulin to bring blood sugar down. Insulin's inflammatory. It tells your body to store fat, not burn it. We need insulin. It's a storage hormone. But we don't need too much insulin. It's problematic. Also, one of the things that happens when you don't get a good night's sleep is you have elevated ghrelin, which tells your body you're hungry. And you know this. I don't even have to tell you this, guys. You know this to be true. You know that if you don't get a good night's sleep, not only you're crabby in the the next day and you don't feel like working out, but what do you want? You want a latte and a muffin, you want a cookie, you want it's like sugar and caffeine. And here's the biggest challenge. You let yourself have a little bit of that that day, and all of a sudden you're having caffeine and sugars later on in the day. And guess what? Caffeine keeps your adrenaline around. Now you can't sleep again. So what do you do? You think, I know what I'll do. I'll just have a little wine. That will help. Well, a little wine ends up having a lot of wine. And unless you're drinking dry farm wine, and we'll put that into the resources as well, you're getting a lot of alcohol and a lot of additives. And this now can cause a blood sugar response in the middle of the night, because alcohol first seems like a great idea. It raises gaba, it's calming, it helps you sleep, but then it also causes blood sugar dysregulation. And boom, middle of the night, you're waking up at 2 o', clock, you know that feeling messes up your sleep. So in the morning now, you feel crappy again. You reach for the coffee, you reach for the muffin, and the whole bad cycle continues. So let's stop that, okay? Not on my watch. I say, so what's the first thing that you have to do in order to get a good night's sleep? You have to decide it's a priority. You have to make this a priority. And that is super duper important, is to realize this is really important, critical for your health. And I really like to focus when I'm doing these things on one thing. I think we make a big mistake when we say, all right, you know what, I'm getting healthy now. So I'm going to take the gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, peanuts, sugar, artificial sweeteners out of my diet. And I'm going to start exercising every day. I'm going to start tapping and do meditation and I'm going to work on my sleep. It's like, are you kidding? Let's pick one thing, one thing and start there. So hopefully you've already gone through the virgin diet. If you haven't virgin diet, done the virgin diet, you can go to jjvirgin.com forward/challenge. Just know that that's there today is sleep. Hopefully you've lowered your sugar impact with the sugar impact diet. You're taking your supplements. But I want you to pick one thing at a time. If you've gone through any of my programs, you know, we focus on one thing, not 10 things. That sets you up to Fail. And I want to set you up to, to succeed. So now it's going to be sleep. We're going to decide that sleep is the number one priority for our health. It's going to make everything else easier. And that means going to bed during the normal circadian rhythm. So between 9 and 11 at night, earlier, better, and also waking up at the same time every day. This is super important. So wake up. Ideally, this is sometime between 6 and 7 in the morning after 8 to 9 hours of sleep. That is going to be the priority. Number one is that this is what we're going to do. Now let's set you, set you up for a good night's sleep. One of the first things that you want to do is make sure that three to four hours before bed, not one to two hours before bed, three to four hours before bed, you had a hormonal winner of a dinner. All right, so what is that? That's clean protein, like grass fed beef, wild salmon, pastured pork and chicken. That's some healthy fats from things like avocado, olive oil, wild fish that slow, low carbs, like things like squash, pumpkin, legumes, wild rice, and with loads of fiber. Right. That you're also getting from that and from all your non starchy vegetables. So a simple example of this would be wild rice and cauliflower rice mixed together, some broccoli with a little ghee on it and some wild salmon. You got healthy fats from the wild salmon and the ghee. You got the slow, low carbs from the wild rice. You got the fiber from the wild rice and the broccoli and the cauliflower rice. Totally perfect. And what does that do? That gives you great blood sugar control, but also it's going to give you some carbs from the wild rice and the vegetables, of course, that help boost serotonin, which then can convert to melatonin and help you have better night's sleep. Also, it can help boost testosterone, especially important for our men out there. So that's the first thing. And you want to make sure you do that about three to four hours before bed. Again, not too close to bedtime because mechanically you can get some acid reflux. And also at night you should be healing, not digesting. All right, super important. We want to make sure that throughout the night ghrelin can come when you eat. You suppress ghrelin at night. You want it to come up, trigger the release of growth hormone and let you heal. So that's super important. Next thing, about an hour before bed, I Want you to think of this Dr. Michael Bruce. My buddy calls it the power down hour. And I want you to call that. I want you to think of this as the tech free time when you just start to put her. So you're going to turn the lights down. You can. And I'll put a resource in here for my buddy Dave Asprey's truedark glasses. You can wear the glasses with the orange that start to take the light down. You can take the lights down, turn the temperature down in the house to 68 degrees. This is what you want to sleep in. 68 degrees. Get rid of all your tech. This is not the time to be watching tv. To be. To be watching things on your phone or your iPad. If you're reading, get an actual book. And one of my favorite things to do before bed is to read a good but not great book. Super important. Not so great that you'll stay up all night. Okay, so. And putter around. This is not the big thinking time. This is not a time to read email. I always say if you read email at night, you're going to get that email that you can do nothing about that's going to keep you up all night. So shut it all down. This is a tech free time. This is your power down hour. The lights are going down. Maybe you put some soft calming music on. The temperature is going to 68 degrees. And then here's what I do every night. I get in the bathtub with some Epsom salts. Bath magnesium from Epsom salts is super calming, super relaxing. And some lavender. So you can use some lavender essential oils, some magnesium. Get in a hot bath. Because when you get out of the hot bath, you start to cool down. You're in the. The darker room and that just triggers your pineal gland to say, oh, it's time for sleep. Now make sure that you've really set your bedroom up for sleep. And so you want to have a comfortable bed. I have something called a Samina bed. We'll put the resources in the show notes. Oh, my gosh. The most amazing thing doesn't have dust mites. Dust mites are a really disgusting thing that we learned more than I ever wanted to know about when we had Klaus Plumer from Samina come over and install our bed and make sure that you are rotating your pillows and getting new pillows at least once a year. And again, you've got great sheets. I use bamboo sheets. They're inexpensive but amazing. So bamboo sheets, great pillows, rotating all of that so you don't have Dirty, dirty sheets, especially where your face is. And you're not using dust mite pillows. Ick. And that you don't have any tech right around there. This is not where you should have your cell phone, your computers, everything else WI fi is out off around the bed. And same with any lights. You want to be able to have a pitch black room. This is really important. I use something called a Phillips light for waking up. I got this trick from Dr. Alan Christensen and what's super cool about this night light. And again, we'll put this in the show notes@jjvirgin.com forward/sleep podcast. What's super cool about this nightlight is it mimics the sun coming up in the morning. And then little birdies tweet so you don't get some obnoxious, horrible thing waking you up. That's like stressful. You're going to limit fluids at night. Now, a glass of water if you're hungry an hour or so before bed actually can shut down evening hunger pangs. But if you go guzzling a bunch of fluids before bed, you're going to be up throughout the night. So we don't want to do that. And then make sure when you get out of the bath that you dress in whatever you're going to sleep in. And ideally, as I heard from Klaus Plumer, like, you're not sleeping in anything, but make sure that what you're not doing is, is something I was doing when I was traveling, which when I was traveling, I was putting on my workout clothes because I knew I was going to get up early and work out. And I never slept well when I was traveling. And I thought it was, well, I'm in a different bed, I'm away from my hubby. And then I was doing a podcast with Arianna Huffington and she talked about sleep routines and always having a really nice nighty when you travel. And I said, oh, I just wear my workout clothes. And she goes, well, you're telling your body it's time to work out. I'm like, oh, my gosh, that is like the silliest thing. Of course you're right. So if you do sleep in something, make sure you put your sleep clothes on. And then the other thing to think about here is if you are having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. I created a product for me that works amazing and it's called Sleep Candy. It's a chewable lozenge with xylitol, which is great for your teeth. It's lemon flavored, really subtle, and it's got a great synergistic combination of melatonin and five HTP and inostol and B6 and L theanine. Now that's going to help raise GABA, that's calming neurotransmitter. It's going to help with the production of melatonin. That's what comes up to help your body stay asleep and decreases as we age. And of course gaba if your stress goes down, melatonin if you're if your aging goes down and serotonin is how we start to make melatonin and we can do that from 5 HTP, but if we're stressed, that goes down too. So we put everything together to help you stay asleep and of course fall asleep. And that's what I take every single night. We'll have that info in the show notes as well. But the super super important thing to remember here is that you have to sleep to be healthy. And when I look at weight loss and long term weight management, sleep is the missing ingredient. I find so often you cannot have a healthy body composition for the long haul if you are not sleeping well. So you've got to make this a priority.

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Now before I go today and again this is one of my rants but I want to remind you if you've not subscribed on over at itunes man will you do that? I would super appreciate it. Makes a big big difference when people subscribe. And while you're there, subscribe share this with your pals. If you've got pals who are not sleeping, let them know and also leave a review. I'm going to read a review right now. I'm like we read these reviews every single time and I do totally dig it. I'm going to read this review right now from Wellness Nell from the usa and Wellness Nell says concise, helpful and fun. And as you can tell today I am, I'm super like let's get these action steps going, let's tell you why you need to think about this, what you should be doing so that you can put this into immediate action. And so I'm all about that and making sure that, that when you listen to this, you walk out with stuff that you can do that's going to change your life. So here we go. JJ has a fun attitude and the podcast is relatively short and concise, but always packed with amazing information. And she includes a free gift from each of our guests. Highly recommend. Thank you so much Wellness now. And today's free gift is going to be from me because it's me doing this. And again, I'm going to be doing rants on a regular basis. And what I'm doing with these rants, if you're watching now on Facebook, is I'm going to be doing them on Facebook Live. We're saving the recording and putting it onto YouTube as well. And then the becomes a podcast. If you're on Facebook, you haven't tuned into my podcast yet. It's JJ Virgin Lifestyle show again. Jump on over there, subscribe, share it with your pals. And I'd love it if you leave a review and put your name there so I can shout you out. Super. Appreciate it. And the whole team does too. And then we're also posting this all. We're building up my YouTube channel now. So how do I decide what to rant about? Well, a lot of things get me riled up, but also I do a lot of these based on what you all are asking me questions about. So when people start to ask questions, I go, all right, here it is. This is something I need to go on a rant about. So if you've got questions, please post them. Either send me a direct message in Instagram @jj virgin. Leave me a message over at Facebook. On one of my Facebook lives at JJ Virgin Official, you can leave comments on my YouTube channel and you can always pop over to my website and send a note through there as well. Alrighty. Again, thank you so much for being here with all of me and reminding you again, go on over to itunes, subscribe if you haven't yet and share it with friend and I will see you next week. All right, bye bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

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