The Weight Loss Hacks You Haven’t Thought About with JJ Virgin

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle.

Show, where I give you the latest.

Cutting edge intel to help you look, feel and think better. Now, today's show is all about some simple, fast weight loss hacks. You can do things you probably never thought about that can help you lose weight. I have included this one. This is one of those podcasts that I taped while doing a Facebook Live, which makes it super fun because then I get questions real time that I can also incorporate in. So this has all been live. And one of the things I'm going to encourage you as you listen to this is find the thing in here. Find the action step that you can start doing today. Nope, not tomorrow. Today. Find it and do it. Because this information is only valuable if you put it into action. Alrighty, here we go. All right. And we are taping this live on Facebook Live. And today we're going to be talking about weight loss hacks. Simple. I'm not saying easy, guys, not saying easy, but simple, fast weight loss hacks that you can do that probably you've never thought about before, that can make a big shift in your metabolism. And as I talk through these today, here's what I want you to really think about. Start to listen and go, am I doing that? I could be doing that. And I'm going to go through a bunch of them I actually haven't written down. I didn't tell you how many because I have a bunch written down here. This might become a part one and part two, but listen for one that you know, you could, should, and will put into your life, because that's the challenge I'm going to throw out to you today is, you know, this action or this information is only useful if we can actually put it into action. And one of the things that I've always been super keen on is how do you take information and make it usable? Because like, I was in graduate school forever, 40 graduate and doctoral courses, and I found most of the stuff, I'm like, well, that's nice, but I've got real world clients and it actually has to work for them. You know, it has to fit into their lifestyle. So that's what I want you to listen here. All of these things could easily fit into your lifestyle, but today I'M asking for you to make that commitment to pick one to fit into your lifestyle. And here's the first one. And again, I'm sure some of these you might have heard, but I think there are the ones in here that you have not heard. And all of these, as usual, are backed up by science. So the first one is close the kitchen. Close the kitchen. You know, in a perfect world, what would happen with the kitchen situation is we would have a padlock, an alarm and on the kitchen. And if you went in there when you weren't supposed to be in there, like, you know, there'd be a, like a police squad or something in there. And obviously I'm being facetious, but the deal is we can get some strong pulls into the kitchen. We have no business being there because really you want to be eating dinner. You want to really eat by the circadian rhythm. That means eat with breakfast within an hour or two of waking up. Um, and I used to be very strict on that, eat within an hour. But I found actually some people do better waiting a little bit longer. And it depends when you're going to exercise in the morning and how you feel. So exercise some or eat sometime within an hour or two waking up. But here's the key component. You want to stop eating three or more hours before bed. What you really want to look at in terms of eating by the natural circadian rhythm is, is eating around six and then closing the kitchen. And New Yorkers, I mean, you too, I know. Or you could just pretend you're on our time zone the whole time, but you want to eat breakfast, let's say around maybe 7, 8am, have lunch 12, 1, have dinner around 6, shut the door to the kitchen. And this is where I would love to see it locked. Because studies show that if we have a nice 12 to 14 hour overnight fast where blood sugar stable, insulin comes down so you access stored fat for fuel, your gring can come up because your stomach's not full, triggers release of growth hormone. All the stuff that's supposed to happen while we're sleeping and recovering can happen. It can't happen if you go chow down on Ben and Jerry's at 10, 11 o' clock at night and go to sleep. That is not working right. So that's the first one is a nice 12 to 14 hour overnight fast and eat, eat dinner early and then shut the kitchen. And here's an interesting little tidbit. And this will be the next one is a study out of, I think it was University of Washington this Study found that people who were hungry at night and drank glass of water 100% shut down their evening hunger pangs. So what I do want you to focus on, and I loved this, I had a great mentor early on in nutrition who always said, you know, you should add before you take away because quite often when we are taking away, all we're thinking about is what is missing and we can fill in with even worse stuff. And I've seen it myself, I've done it myself. So what I want you to think about here is trying if you are hungry at night, like you're really not actually if you ate by that trifecta of good clean protein, healthy fats and some low sugar impact, high fiber carbs, you got great blood sugar response. You're not hungry, you've just got Pavlops dog going on there. You've trained yourself. And so what I want you to do is have a glass of water because ideally, and this is another one of these easy weight loss hacks, you are getting in lots of water in between your meals. Now I do water and I do ice cream tea because ice cream tea has a nice little thermic effect. It's also got theanine, which is nice and calming and it's also got great antioxidants. But it can help with insulin sensitivity. And if your body can hear insulin better, you are going to be better at burning fat. And this is something we definitely want to be better at. So what I want you to think of instead is when you wake up in the morning, start with some water. I always have some water next to my bed stand so I can take my, my westeroid thyroid medication. Then I do my journaling. I drink my water and then of course I have coffee, but that's first thing. And then drink water throughout the day, in between your meals. When you think you're hungry and you're actually not hungry, you actually should be drinking that water because so often we are not hungry at all. We're thirsty. But here's the super cool thing about water and here's why you should do it. We're you drink water, it's going to boost your metabolism. It can boost your metabolism, metabolism as much as 30%. That's a ton. That could be 300 more calories burnt throughout the day. And here's the bigger issue. Even mild dehydration, mild dehydration, 1 to 2%, which you'll never feel, can raise stress hormones. And when you raise stress hormones, you store more fat around your waist and you make it harder to burn off. And of course, we also know that when you raise stress hormones, you start to cool, crave sugar, and you get leaky gut and all sorts of stuff goes sideways. So first thing was close the kitchen. Second thing is drink your water. Third thing is get to sleep. And when we sit close the kitchen at night, that's because what we want to be doing is going to sleep during the normal circadian rhythm as well. And I think to my buddy, Dr. Michael Bruce, the sleep doctor. Glamour magazine actually did a study. It was like 10 or 12 people and all they did was tell them. Because one of the things that Michael Bruce talks about is all the research about weight loss and good sleep. And all they did, they didn't change these women's diets at all. They just had them move from being short sleepers like five to six hours a night to sleeping seven plus hours a night. And they all lose weight. And here's why. And when I say sleep, I'm talking eight to nine hours of sleep a night. Just one poor night. And I want you to think about this and see if you can relate, because I know I can. And if you feel the same way, those of you listening to this podcast live on Facebook, live on my Facebook page, I want to see some, maybe some sad faces here because just one poor night of sleep, and you know, we all have that range we need, I tend to do best at about eight and a half hours. I've trained my fiance. When he first, when we first met, he was a five to six hour night sleeper. Now he is a eight to nine hours night sleep or two. But just one poor night of sleep. You are more insulin resistant. What does that mean? You're better at storing fat and worse at burning it off. You're hungrier, you're hungrier. And by the way, you're not hungry for salmon. Let's be real, you're not hungry for broccoli, you're hungry for carbs because your serotonin is low from getting poor sleep. And when your serotonin is low, you crave sugar because that helps bump up serotonin in your brain. So you've got poor energy. So now you're going to crave more sugar and you're going to crave more caffeine. And I see a lot of people relating to this. So you, you're, you want more quick energy, foods that crash and burn you more, that then set you up to be tired, that then make it harder for you to sleep again. The next night, because you're probably using some caffeine throughout the day and too much wine at night. And then that is going to cause some unstable blood sugar and wake you up again and the whole cycle starts to continue. So poor sleep makes you hungry. It actually takes all of your fat storing hormones and makes them better and all of your fat burning hormones worse. This is the opposite of what we want. So you're making yourself insulin and leptin resistant. You're elevating cortisol. You've got great lin up. So all of the things that make you hungry are up. All of the things that make you burn fat off are not working well bad. So one of the first things you can start to do, I mean, if I was going to pick just one thing to improve your health, it wouldn't be it. You know, you'd think, oh, jj, it's going to be mindset. You've been talking about mindset. Or it's going to be food intolerance or sugar. But if I had to really just say, okay, what's the one thing? If you start to focus on getting a good night's sleep, that's eight to nine hours during the normal circadian rhythm of quality sleep, your mindset's going to improve. You're going to want to think more about that. You'll read my miracle mindset book. Then you'll. You'll be able to make good goals, you'll be able to exercise better, you'll make good food choices. So this is key, all right? And it's really about what I find with sleep. And I've got a great podcast with Ariana Huffington and another great one with Sean Stevenson. So I would recommend listening to both of those. Both of them have great sleep books out. Because if it's an issue with sleep, a lot of it I find, is people just aren't making the time for sleep. And if it's beyond that, then we can talk good sleep hygiene. In fact, Ariana gave me a little tip during our interview that I still remember. I was like, I can't believe I never thought of that. And you just will have to listen to that podcast to know what I'm talking about. All right? So another thing that I like to do is to swap things out. And I was actually, I'm out in the desert right now recording this, and I was cleaning out my bookshelf. And you can see my bookshelf. If you're watching this live on Facebook live, you'll see it's kind of a mess. Behind me because I've been throwing out stuff and. And I pulled out a book and written by a buddy of mine who I thought, gosh, this is kind of an interesting one, all about how to lose fat. And I thought, fantastic. I was just thumbing through it and he recommended Splenda. And I thought, oh, my gosh. But wait a minute.

How could you?

I've known you for years. How. How could you say such blasphemy? But it is true. Like, if you are thinking about weight loss and you recommend Splenda, there's something ser. Seriously wrong. Because one of the things we know about Splenda and about artificial sweeteners is they can actually feed the bad bacteria in your gut. And they can also change the bacteria in your gut so that they're more glucose intolerant. If you don't handle sugar well, then you're going to have a bigger insulin response, then you're going to be better at storing fat. You'll have more blood sugar instability. This is a terrible thing. If you've got more bad bacteria in the gut, you extract more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. Plus, the other thing we know about artificial sweeteners is when you eat sweet, what do you want more of? Yep, sweet, right? So you have that issue. They also cause calorie dysregulation, so you lose the ability to correlate the degree of sweetness with how much you are eating. So then you tend to overeat. So there's that issue. But then in Splenda, we know Splenda is made from chlorine and, or the chloride molecule. I know that if you put Splenda and bleached white flour and toothpaste together, it's like the triple threat of toxic load for your thyroid. So I just. This is one that doesn't work. What we, what we want to do here is obviously lower your sugar impact and get rid of your sweet tooth. That's what the Sugar Impact diet was set up to do. But the other thing that I want you to think about here is, yes, and I love all the evils. I'm getting a lot of evil, evil looks here on Facebook because you all know no one's having artificial sweeteners, right? We are not doing that. And the alternatives, ideally, you're really getting rid of your sweet tooth. And the Sugar impact diet set up to take, teach you how many carbs you. You personally can have. It's different for everybody. Although I believe we all do better lowering our carbs. Dropping our sugar impact and eating more fiber. But sweeteners that you can use. Erythritol, xylitol, stevia, monk fruit, and glycine, the amino acid glycine, which is naturally sweet. So there are options out there. Cinnamon's amazing balances blood sugar. Vanilla can boost serotonin. So those are all great options. Now, in talking about artificial sweeteners, I started to mention gut microbiome, and I can't talk gut microbiome without talking about fiber. Fiber is such an easy one to throw into the weight loss hacks because not only is going to help keep you fuller longer because it slows down stomach emptying, fiber also feeds the good bacteria in your gut and you want to crowd out the bad guys and have more good guys. Too many bad bacteria, you will be gaining weight even if you're cutting your calories. Of course, we know when you really cut your calories, you trash your metabolism too slow everything down. So that's not the way to go. But you can get yourself to a place where you're hardly eating anything and still having problems because those bad bacteria were built to survive a famine and they're grabbing onto everything. So you want to feed the good guys and bop out the bad guys. And fiber is one of the ways to do that. Besides fiber. Super detoxifying. So it can help get rid of things. And I gotta say it, it's Monday morning, hopefully that you all can say that I had a poop to be proud of today. Go ahead and give me a big smiley, admit it if you did, or a big thumbs up. But fiber is one of the key things to do that. And you should be starting your morning off right. If you're not, magnesium is your friend in an Epsom salts bath. So those are a bunch of the keys, I think, because I just mentioned fiber, though, I should. There's a couple other things I think. Oh, a lot of, A lot of people, it's like that I raising my hand going, I pooped today. You know those great T shirts they have for little, little kids? The things you can put on your little kids and your dogs. So a couple other things, quick ones that can help and then we'll do a recap. The other thing that can help here is handling stress. And you know, the idea of stress management just to me like, makes me crazy because it's like all of us stress people need more to do. But what you really do need to think of is what can you put in your hip pocket that can help you handle stress? Could it be emotional freedom technique tapping? In fact, my friend Jessica Ortner wrote the book Tapping for Weight Loss because tapping can lower stress hormones. And when you have better managed stress management, you will lose weight. Remember, when you're stressed, you get leaky gut food intolerance. That's what the Virgin diet's written about. You're going to crave more sugar, you'll tend to overeat, you don't sleep well. Then you have the problems with insulin resistance. So it all gets to be full circle. And all that causes you to store more fat around your waist. So looking at what you can do personally to manage your stress is a key one here. So critical and it's different for everybody. If you told me, you know, some people, they can manage their stress great by going to yoga, me, that just, that stresses me out more. How crazy is that? All right, so I'm going to share with you because one of the things that I ask all my guests on the program, which today my guest is me, I ask all of them, what is the one thing that you do every day that you feel makes the biggest difference in your life? And you know, you may be hearing me thinking, oh, it's her morning smoothie. She starts off with it's burst training. But in reality, the thing that I've done every single day, it's I talk about in the book the miracle mindset. And I credit to being able to like go through some serious insurmountable odds and not lose it too much, is getting up every morning, pulling out a journal and writing down at least three things I'm grateful for. And so that is what I do every single day without fail. Every once in a while, if I miss it, I notice my day is just not, not working well. So I just have gotten to a point where I just don't, don't do it anymore. Now. Thank you so much for joining me. After the break, I'll be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

It's scary but true. Sugar is hiding everywhere in diet foods, packaged foods, dressings, and even sugar substitutes. It's not about cutting out all sugar. It's knowing which sugars to choose and which to lose. What if you could drop seven hidden sugars, lose up to ten pounds in just two weeks? JJ Virgin will show you how with a simple four step plan to cut cravings and rev up your metabolism to lose fat fast and forever. Visit jjvirgin.com books and order the Sugar Impact diet. You can shed up to ten pounds in two weeks, visit jjvirgin.com forward/books welcome back.

This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question came up over and over and over on the live broadcast. And it so I'm not going to mention the names because it was multiples. Wanted to know what kinds of sweeteners could they use? What about stevia? What about Monk fruit? What about Splenda? So let me share with you my list of approved sweeteners. And the second part of that question was what is a sugar alcohol? So the sweeteners that I allow my program are and this is both for virgin diet and Sugar Impact diet are stevia, xylitol, Monk fruit and erythritol. Erythritol and xylitol are sugar alcohols. I actually allow, you know, all the sugar alcohols on the program, but those are the ones that you find easiest commercially, but I'll use the other ones and things like bars and shakes like that, they're okay. And then other things I like are glycine, a sweet amino acid, actually helps balance blood sugar. Vanilla that can boost serotonin, and cinnamon, that can help with blood sugar balance. Now, Monk Fruit and stevia are herbs. Rtol and Xylitar altol are sugar alcohol. So then the next question was, what's a sugar alcohol? Well, sugar alcohols are polyols. They differ from carbohydrates in that carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram. Sugar alcohols generally are Depending on which one, around 2.2.4 for because your small intestine can't absorb a lot of it, they generally don't raise blood sugar, don't raise insulin, and don't feed yeast. Depending on the sugar alcohol. Some of these things might make you gassy or bloated or have loose stools. So I'm just giving you a heads up on that. Different ones vary. Erythritol doesn't do that. That's one of the ones that I prefer to use because of that reason. And you're just going to have to see how you feel. I know I cannot handle xylitol, sadly enough, but I do use as one of the allowable sweeteners for people who can handle it. So again, it comes down to you. But the big takeaway that I talked about again in this podcast was that you don't want to start to become reliant on these things, which you actually want to use them on. Use them for as transition products. So as you're lowering your Sugar Impact. As you're getting sugar out, you're trading, swapping your sugar or artificial sweeteners for these allowable sweeteners and then you're tapering those down and the Sugar Impact diet walks you through how to do that so that you will lose your sweet tooth for good. Yay. And that's what we really want to do, is lose that sweet tooth. Okay, now this is the time. Oh, by the way, if you do want to ask a question, I take all the questions on my Facebook page and I love it when I'm doing a Facebook live and and I see questions. So pop on over to my Facebook page at JJ Virgin Official and you can also subscribe to find out when I'm live. And that's fantastic because then we can interact directly. But that is where I, I answer all my, I find the questions that I answer on the show. So pop on over there and do that. Now. Be super grateful for you being involved there. And another way that I show gratitude, this is the gratitude portion of the show. This is when I talk about, I find someone who's left a review and I do a shout out. And I love to highlight a different review each week. I'm going to be highlighting one from Chris who says best no nonsense health hacks. JJ has a way of taking all the cutting edge science, all the pulp culture, health fads and everything in between. I identify what's real and distilling it down to the simplest, most straightforward ways we can use it in our lives. She doesn't sugarcoat it. So check your ego at the door and get on with feeling better. Awesome guest too. Great podcast for the gym. Thank you, Chris. We read. The whole team reads each and every review on itunes. We love them. So I super appreciate it and I appreciate you joining me today. And again, I want to remind you, gave you a lot of information. The next step, figure out which thing you are going to take action on. Because it's the taking action that makes all the difference. Alrighty. Until next time, this is JJ Virgin signing off on the JJ Virginia lifestyle show. Bye bye.

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