The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do for… Well, Everything

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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.

So I'm going to talk to you about the single most important thing you can do to help you have more energy. Get rid of your cravings. Get control of your appetite. Slow down the aging process. Help your immune system lose weight. You interested? It's just one thing. One thing. Get to sleep. That is it. Okay, so one poor night of sleep. Failure to get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep. We're going to talk about how much you know, how much is right for you. Because we're all different here. Just one poor night of sleep. The next day, your hormones are in chaos. They're in an uproar. You're more insulin and leptin resistant. What does that mean? That means that your body can't hear these as well. So you're hungrier and better storing fat. Your ghrelin's higher, you're hungrier. Your cortisol's higher. That means your blood sugar's higher, your serotonin's lower. You're craving more sugar, your dopamine's lower, you're hungrier. What does this all mean? You are better at storing fat and you're hungrier and you are not hungry for salmon and brussels sprouts. And you know this. You know how it feels that next day when you haven't had a good night's sleep, you're sitting here going, where's the coffee? Where's the sugar? Where's the muffin? Lather, rinse, repeat, right? So then what happens? You have a poor night's sleep. You get up the next morning, you feel crappy. You have the sugar hit, you have the caffeine hit. The mid morning, it starts to drop off. You do it again. In the afternoon, it hits again. And then nighttime comes and you've done a big stimulant hit in the Afternoon. So now you're tired, but you're wired. Oh no. So you drink some alcohol to help you go to sleep. And maybe you take something to help you sleep, but you can't sleep. And maybe you wake up in the middle of the night, up again, and you wake up in the morning, you have to use an alarm. You wake up, you're tired, you don't feel rested, so the whole cycle starts again. So let's start with the first piece of this. What is a good night's sleep? A good night's sleep means that you get in bed, you're following the normal circadian rhythm. You get in bed somewhere between 9 and 11, you fall asleep within, you know, 20, 30 minutes of getting in bed, even sooner, you fall asleep easily, it's not a struggle, and you stay asleep all night long. And then you wake up feeling rested without an alarm clock. And if you're listening to me going, she's crazy, she has totally lost it. Right? Okay, so first thing I'm going to share with you how you can make this a reality. But first of all, how do you really know what a good night's sleep is like for you? How much time do you really need? You know, the best way to do this is to take a couple days, especially if you can do a vacation or a staycation and go to bed somewhere in your 10, 11 o' clock range, whatever is normal for you within the normal circadian rhythm. And then let yourself wake up naturally and do this for a couple days in a row and you'll find that you've got your natural place. For me, it's, you know, eight, eight and a half hours. That's when I feel best. I do not feel good at seven. Some people can do that short sleeping and do great. And if I sleep too long, I feel groggy too. So you'll find where you are, where your sweet spot is, and then you're going to take that time, you're going to make it a priority, which means figure out what time you need to get up every day. And ideally you, you should be getting up around the same time every day, no matter what, weekends, weekdays. So figure out what that is. So if you normally have to get up around six, that's your wake time. So let's just then walk it back. If you need eight hours of sleep and you have to get up at 6, you need to start powering down around 9 so that you are asleep at 10. And it's really important here to have a routine, you know, I Travel half the time. But my routine is the same whether I'm at home or I'm in a hotel where the hour before bed the technology goes down. I take a hot bath. Because a hot bath makes your body have to accelerate the cooling down process. I'm reading a good but not great book. I'm doing kind of putter routine stuff. I'm organizing my day for the next day. I get the room pitch black. I cool it down to 64 degrees. My friend Dr. Sarah Gottfried told me that's the optimal temperature. 64 degrees. Woo. You know, and I've made sure that my bed is really comfortable. I've got my pillows and everything else. So that's how I've set myself up. I've got the phone off and away from my bed so I don't wake up tempted to look at it. And then some things that you can do during the day to help set you up for that good night's sleep. Exercise early in the day. I still think back to when I lived in Japan. I had to teach this late aerobics class, 8 o' clock at night and I was up till 2 every morning. So exercise early in the day. The minute you wake up in the morning, flip on the lights, open up the windows, open up the drapes, get the natural sunshine in to help trigger your brain that it's now wakey wakey time. Cortisol's coming up. You know, make sure you're eating well throughout the day. Have that dinner three hours before bed. Eat by the virgin Diet and sugar impact plate clean lean protein, healthy fats, slow low carbs and lots of non starchy vegetables. You don't want to eat right before bed. You want to eat a couple hours before bed. You really want to do that nice 12 to 14 hour intermittent fast because when you're sleeping, ghrelin should come up which happens when your stomach's emptying to trigger the release of growth hormone. Watch the caffeine. If you're caffeine sensitive, cut that caffeine after noon. If you're not caffeine sensitive then you don't have this much of this issue, but I find most people are. So it's really watch. Once you've gotten through the morning, no more caffeine. And watch the alcohol too. Usually one glass is fine, but when you go over that, you're going to trigger a hypoglycemic response. How do you know if that's happening? Because you wake up at 2. If you're waking up between 2 and 3, that's that hypoglycemic response from the alcohol. Little alcohol raises gaba, the big neuroinhibitory drug neurotransmitter in the brain. Too much, bam, you're gonna have hypoglycemia. No tv, no electronics, and quiet bed partners. So if you got a snoring spouse, go send them in for a sleep study and a CPAP machine or whatever it is that they need to get them to stop the snoring. Last night, I sent the dog in bed with my son because sometimes I'll sleep with the dog and the cat, which results in a fight in the middle of the night. So watch those things. And no stimulating activities right before bed. And I think one of the worst offenders there, email. Because not only does the light from the email light up the fire up your neurons in your brain, but I found that, like, the email that you get at night before bed is always something that you can't do anything about, but you can stress about all night long. Now, besides all that, there are some supplements that can help you. One of them is melatonin. I especially like this when you travel because it helps reset the circadian rhythm. It's really good when you have to phase forward. Like if you're on the west coast coast, going to the east coast, it helps you phase forward so you can fall asleep earlier. Now, melatonin, the main role of it is to control the circadian rhythms, and it really should peak at night. So you might want to take a little bit more of that Melatonin. It's really important for helping you get control of your circadian rhythms and help maintain quality sleep patterns. By the way, melatonin also declines with age. So that can be part of the reason that we have more sleep problems with age. There's this big urban legend that we need less sleep as we age. No, we don't. We just don't sleep as well as we age. And melatonin could be a cause of that. I actually take melatonin every single night. 3mg. 5 HTP is another one. It's a precursor to serotonin. And remember, serotonin is going to help melatonin production. So I love taking 5 HTP that goes to serotonin, that helps boost melatonin or make melatonin. And then, of course, B6 is one of the things that you need in the neurotransmitter cascade to help you make your 5 HTP. So B6 is very important to help you make that conversion from 5 HTP to serotonin. And another great nutrient here is inositol. Inositol is a calming B vitamin that helps support overall relaxation and maintain the proper metabolism of serotonin. And finally, theanine. L theanine, which helps raise GABA and helps reduce stress and improve the quality of sleep, can also help focus during the day. Now I put together a product, we call it Sleep Sleep Candy. They're these really yummy little yellow tablets that have all of those nutrients in them that can help you sleep. And they're especially great to take with you when you travel. One of the things I really, really tell you to do, and I always say, you know, what you measure you can improve and what you measure and record, you can improve exponentially. So try one of the sleep trackers. There's a variety of different ones out there now that can actually record the quality of sleep at how restless you are, if you snore, how much you're awake. And that's a great way to start because again, what you measure you can improve. And it's hard for you to know unless you've got something that's kind of like Big Brother watching you. And then depending on the information you get there, you may need to go see a doctor and you may need to get some kind of help with this. This is so critical. This is the single most important thing that you can do for your overall health. And so often people come to me and they go, I need more energy. Well, the reason they need more energy is they're not sleeping well. So this is the place I want you to start. Start focusing on your sleep. Improve your sleep. A whole lot of stuff gets better too.

Want a better quality of sleep while also calming your brain? Now there's a great tasting way to do it. JJ Virgin's Lemon Flavored Sleep Candy contains amino acids and nutrients to help you naturally fall asleep with ease. This gluten free, non GMO dairy free sleep assistant also helps you stay asleep so you feel rejuvenated and more relaxed. So if you want to get a better night's sleep, visit www.jjvirgin.com products and try JJ's Sleep Candy.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Boeckle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books, they love one book. They don't and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And, of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast, and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.