The Most Frustrating Obstacle for Fast, Lasting Fat Loss

Hey, it's J.J. here. You know, I've been talking about environmental toxins forever, and laundry detergent is a sneaky one. A lot of them contain harsh chemicals like dyes, preservatives, and even UV brighteners. Those brighteners don't actually clean anything. They just coat fabric so your eyes think things look whiter or brighter. That's more chemicals I don't want on my family sheets or skin. And if you've got sensitive skin or allergies around the house, this can be a big problem. That's what got my attention about Earth Breeze. It looks like a dryer sheet, but it's actually laundry detergent. You toss one in the washer and that's it. No pouring, no mess, and no heavy plastic jug. Their packaging is lightweight cardboard, which helps reduce plastic waste. And if you choose the fragrance free option, it's gentle, hypoallergenic, non irritating, and non sensitizing. I really like how simple it is and how fresh and clean everything comes out without those unnecessary chemicals. Right now you can try Earth Breeze for up to 40% off with free gifts@earthbreeze.com virgin that's earthbreeze.com virgin for up to 40% off plus free gifts on your first order. Hey, JJ here. Can you believe how fast the holidays are knocking at the door this year? One minute it's pumpkin spice season, the next you're getting your guest room ready and wondering where their wrapping paper went. And that's when I turned to Wayfair. From bedding and towels to holiday decor and last minute stocking stuffers, Wayfair has everything you need to get your home and holidays together fast. And for way less. With Wayfair, I know I can refresh my guest room in no time. Maybe I'll add a soft new comforter or a few holiday throw pillows. With Wayfair, it's so easy and everything arrives super fast. Plus, there's free shipping for any order over $35 easy and total peace of mind. So whether you're hosting, gifting, or just adding those final festive touches, Wayfair has your back. 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. 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 dot com this episode is brought to you by Pacifico Here's a story you've probably never heard. Legend has it, decades ago, a couple surfers went down to Mexico in search of epic swells. But they found something unexpected instead. It was it was still crisp, lively and smooth, but it had nothing to do with waves. It was Pacifico, a delicious Mexican lager. It's like it was brewed to be discovered. Pacifico. Find your own way. 21 Discover responsibly Pacifico Clara beer imported by Crown Import, Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the Virgin Diet lifestyle show with your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling.

Author, J.J. virginia 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 is 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 fructose. First you're going to think, J.J. 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 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 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 it 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, you, 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. Why? Because I want you to get bad at transporting fructose to 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 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, 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 got a burst. How cool is that?

Hey, it's J.J. here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting, gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend. And honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time. And that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monimal.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code Virgin.

The holidays are almost here, but there's still time to score great gifts at Dick's Sporting Goods. Find everyone's must have gifts from Nike, FP Movement, Adidas and more. Need your gifts fast? Stop by your local Dick's or shop Dick's.com for fast shipping, curbside pickup or same day delivery. Every holiday starts at Dick's. 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 len lentils? You mean black beans? They give me gas. Condition your GI tract. Shout out to Dr. Alan Christiansen 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 pigging 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 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, J.J. 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. 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 five 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 5-8885 and enter JJPlateau1 that is JJ P L A T E A U and the number one space, your first name, another space and your email address. Again you text to 58885 and enter JJPlateAU1 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.

Hey everyone, did you like this episode? Be sure to subscribe for the next one and subscribe. Tell a friend if you'd like world class training and cutting edge information. Visit the Virgin Diet.com. Toyota Thon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer and test drive a rugged Tacoma or full size Tundra with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com for more Toyota let's go places.

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