The Most Frustrating Obstacle for Fast, Lasting Fat Loss

Hey JJ Here. Every year around this time, I get the urge to make my home feel a little extra special. A space that feels just like the holidays. And Wayfair is my go to for that. Think cozy textures, twinkly decor, warm lighting, and all those little touches that make you want to curl up with a good book and a blanket. You'll usually find my books stacked on a great little end table I got from Wayfair, proof that function and style give can coexist. Now, whether you're adding last minute hosting essentials, picking out gifts for loved ones, or refreshing your decor for the season, Wayfair makes it easy with beautiful finds, great prices and fast delivery. And when the holidays wind down, Wayfair has everything you need to tuck it all neatly away. Smart storage solutions for every room from the kitchen to the closet. Plus, with free shipping for any order over $35, don't that's fast delivery and a total peace of mind. It's the perfect mix of joy and order, bringing the holiday spirit in, then storing it all with ease. If you're ready to make your home feel as good as it looks, get organized, refreshed and ready for the holidays. For way less head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. Wayfair Every style Every home that's W A Y F A I R.com hey, it's JJ 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 that dreaded plateau.

You know the weight you get stuck at that you just can't seem to get below no matter how hard you try. Well, in this show I'm going to share five of my top plateau busting tips. But before I do, I want to remind you that as you do them, you're going to want to make sure that you're looking past the scale weight to really look at what that weight is made up of. If you've added resistance training or burst training to your program, you actually may be improving your body composition without it showing on the scale initially as body fat weighs less than muscle as you know. So if you're losing fat and building muscle, your weight could stay the same or even increase while you're dropping sizes and getting leaner. So be sure to monitor body fat along with your weight. The other thing you're going to want to monitor here are your measurements, specifically your waist and hips. If you're losing weight but you're not losing your waist, you are actually making yourself worse, not better. Now thankfully, all of these tips I'm about to share with you are going to help you burn that fat while holding onto or building muscle. First one is to lower your fructose load. You're going to cut out fruit and all fructose containing foods for two weeks. This is what I do in the sugar impact diet and here's why. Okay, fructose. Now first you're going to think JJ fruit. Wait a minute, I don't get it. And I'm not saying no fruit forever, okay? But the deal is fruit contains fructose. And what we are getting fructose in all sorts of places that we didn't used to. And that's really the problem is we're getting an overload of fructose and fructose is metabolized differently than any other sugar in the body. When you eat fructose, it goes straight to the Liver. Now, it doesn't raise blood sugar, and we used to think that was a great thing. But by not raising blood sugar, it also doesn't trigger insulin, leptin, ghrelin, all these satiety signals to tell you that you've eaten. Instead, it's going straight to the liver and, and ideally, if there was room there, it would get turned into glucose and stored as energy. But you know what, the liver is a small place and it gets full fast. And so you know what that fructose is turning into pretty much all the time that fructose is turning into fat. And like I just told you, it's turning into fat and you're still hungry. Now, turns out the more fructose you eat, the better you get at elevating it, at getting it straight to the liver because you've elevated something called GLUT5 transport system. The more you eat, the more that you produce, the faster and better you get at getting it to the liver and making fat while you're still hungry. And obviously it's in fruit, which over time isn't a problem because the fruit comes with fiber and phytonutrients. But if you unwrap the fruit, that is juice, fruit juice concentrate, or you concentrate into purees or dried fruit, or you take the sugar out and turn into high fructose corn syrup and to put it into things, you get this overload of fructose and you create this body that becomes really good at storing fat and getting hungry and by the way, aging fast too. And it turns out that if you eat something with fructose in it after you work out, it actually makes your body, it shuts down the fat burning you would have had from the workout. So what I want you to do is what I have people do in the sugar impact diet. Of course we taper to get here, but we take two weeks and we get all the fructose containing fruits out. We why? Because I want you to get bad at transporting fructose liver. I want you to get bad at making fat. I want you to get your appetite control center back in control again so you actually aren't hungry in between meals. Okay, so that's. The first one is we're going to lower the fructose. The second one is we're going to get the heck out of the kitchen. And now I'm going to say this because I'm assuming that you're not stashing food elsewhere in the house or in the car or, or in the briefcase or the purse.

Right.

Okay. So the food's in the kitchen and you're getting out of the kitchen for 12 to 14 hours. So what I want you to do is eat at least three hours or more before bed and give yourself a nice overnight fast. Because if you have dinner around 6, 7, you wake up at 6 and have breakfast around 7, you've just gotten your nice 12 hour plus fast. So we want to get that fast in. So insulin comes down, your body's able to use stored fat for fuel. Now here's another one that I love is if the first thing you can do in the morning, you get up before breakfast and you burst a blast fat, you get up and you do a burst session. You go 30 to 60 seconds all out. I love using the exciser, my little stepper machine, because you're going to burn off those fat storing enzymes and you're going to burn up some of that sugar, then go and eat. But ideally, I'd love to see you do a couple burst sessions before breakfast. And guess what else? You can throw a few in throughout the day. You don't have to do them all at once. So you could have your exciser at the door of your office. So in order for you to get in and out of your office, you gotta burst. How cool is that?

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

So often the holidays sneak up on.

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Next thing I want you to do is add some resistant starch. I'm going to tell you about this. Basically, resistant starch is a super special type of starch that doesn't act like most starches which go and raise your sugar right away and get stored as fat. Resistant starch actually improves insulin sensitivity and lowers blood sugar levels because it improves your gut health and it also curbs your appetite which helps with fast fat loss. So the deal with resistant starch is it resists digestion. That's why it's called resistant starch and it remains intact until it arrives in your colon where it breaks down that resistant starch into short chain fatty acids that the colon cells then use for energy. So it's so critical for great health and especially a healthy gut. It also works like a prebiotic, much like inulin does because it feeds your healthy gut flora. Now other things that it does is it's going to reduce inflammation, it lowers your risk for numerous conditions including Crohn's disease, constipation and diarrhea. So best source of resistant starch here that are low sugar impact are legumes. And in the sugar impact diet I have you do legumes every day. Now if you're one of those people that goes oh my gosh JJ legumes. You mean lentils? You mean black beans? They give me gas. Condition your GI tract. Shout out to Dr. Alan Christensen for this one for me. But a tablespoon of beans for a week should help you be able to then handle having a half cup. Because that's all I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about piggin out on beans. You can't anyway. But if you find still with legumes at a half cup you're still getting a little gassy even after that week of conditioning. Go ahead and have a little beano with it. Now other thing that can really be a plateau buster for you. In fact, this was a really crazy study that I think they did at Good housekeeping. My buddy, Dr. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor, told me about this. They said all they had this group do was sleep more. They didn't instruct them on diet or anything else. And they all, when they got their seven to nine hours of sleep, they lost weight simply by sleeping more. Because if you have even one poor night of sleep, you wake up, your cortisol's higher, you're more insulin resistant, you're more leptin resistant. What does that mean? Jg that means that you're hungrier. And not for salmon. You're tired, you don't want to work out, so you're hungry, you want sugar, your serotonin's lower, you're feeling stressed and crabby and tired, so you want to eat sugar, you don't want to work out. Recipe for disaster. So how do you make sure you get a good night's sleep? Here's a really good one. You have this power down hour before bed, one hour before bed. No tech, because tech lights up your brain. Nothing stimulating, no coffee. Watch how much alcohol you have. One glass might help you sleep, but another glass might make you hypoglycemic in the middle of the night, raise adrenaline, wake you back up, and you'll know you wake up at 2:30. That was the alcohol that you had. After dinner, get yourself into a routine. You know, I travel all the time, but everywhere I go I have the same nighttime routine that gets me ready for bed. It's a hot bath. I've got some lavender I put into it. I have a good but not great book that helps me read, but it doesn't keep me up because I can't put it down. Also make sure that you eat well at dinner. If you go to bed hungry, you're not going to be able to make it through the night. So again, a good dinner. Eating by the the Sugar impact or virgin diet plate three hours before bed so that you don't trigger some hypoglycemia. And look at some of the things that can help with sleep support. Oftentimes if you're going through menopause, you might have elevated cortisol, so vitamin C or phosphylserine can help lower those. Or if you're stressed, vitamin C, phosphorylserine. But then there's some great things that also can help with sleep support, and that's GABA and valerian and theanine and magnesium and 5 HTP and melatonin now I kind of blurted out this whole bit about resistant starch, so to make it easy for you, I've got some of my favorite recipes that are rich in resistant starch and have low or no fructose. Text 58885 and enter JJ Plateau 1 that is JJ P L A T E A U and the number one space, your first name another space and and your email address. Again you text to 58885 and enter JJPlateau 1 space, your first name space and your email address. In the Sugar Impact Diet, I help you clear up the confusion around sugar and take back the control that sugar has over your life. In just two weeks, you'll lose your sweet tooth and shrink your waistline. So why wait? Start those two weeks today.

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