Top 3 Metabolism Dangers & How to Avoid Them with JJ Virgin

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I want to rethink the way you do your diet. Because when you rethink this and start to think caloric variability and macronutrient variability, it can help you become more metabolically flexible. And you want to be that because your body then is better burning fat day long, which is what we want.

Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, fitness hall of famer and four time New York Times best selling 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 Live.

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 Virgin. And today I am going to be talking about metabolism. All right, this is a really hot topic because you hear all the time about fast metabolism and people complain they can't lose weight because their metabolism is slow. And I want to just kind of disrupt this. I like being disruptive and say, do we really want a fast metabolism? Could that age us more? Is really, is a slow metabolism really what's causing the problem? Or perhaps it's something else like stress or insulin resistance. So we're gonna be breaking that down Today. We're gonna be talking about metabolism, things you can do because it really comes down to it's not fast or slow. It's how do you support your metabolism to be the best, to easily burn off stored fat for fuel to hold onto or build muscle to have great sustained energy throughout the day. Sound good? Let me know. I'm recording this podcast live on Facebook and Instagram, so I wanna hear if you are in agreement with me on that and you say yes, I want to be able to burn fat. Eff. Uh huh. All right. So if you've been feeling like I know I've been trying everything and it must just be that I have a slow metabolism or no matter how much I work out, nothing seems to help. This, my friend, is for you today. So we are going to have show notes here. I'm going to be mentioning a lot of cool resources all throughout the show. You can get the show notes, I've made notes on it. You can get them at metasupport. That's for metabolism support. So you'll go to jjvirgin.com meta support m e T A support. All one word. All one word. All right, cool. So before we dive in, I always read a review. Now I chose to read a three star review when I'm going live but I told my team the other day I go, come on, they're not all five star reviews. I want to see all of them. And one of the things I'm really clear about on the JJ Virgin lifestyle shows, I want to serve you. I'm doing this podcast for you. So if there's something that you want, a topic you'd like to know more about, something you'd like to see shift, let us know. So jump on over to itunes or wherever you tune in and if you're not tuned in yet, you can just go to subscribe to jj. Simple. Subscribe to JJ to do so and leave a review. Let us know what you think and let us know what you really think in a kind way. All right, so here's the review. I want to do a shout out for today and it's from Jen the rn. That's super cute, Jen. Jen the RN from the usa. And the review said Diabesity three star review. Jj, I love your show. Most topics are super interesting to me and I learn little nuggets from every show. However, I was super saddened to listen to this episode. Type 2 diabetes is an enormous issue in this country. As a nurse and a person who works out and needs quality every day, I always appreciate anyone who tries to educate the general community about this topic. Education awareness is the key, but as a mom of a type 1 diabetic, I was disappointed that nowhere in the courting was type two mentioned. So it's platforms like that have such a large audience and ability to educate that frustrate me so much. For 10 years my 16 year old daughter has had to battle rude comments from people who are ignorant As a member of many social media pages filled with parents like me, I can tell you that her experience is not unique. Okay, this breaks my heart. Plus, as a mom with a special needs kid, I'm totally hearing you. Next time the subject is discussed, can you please take a moment to educate your listeners about the differences between type one and type two and ensure this topic is crystal clear. Thanks, jj. All right, you know what? This is so critically important and I think what's happened, sadly enough is that it has become like type 2 diabetes. I mean, I remember reading some stats that said that if we do not change things by the year 2030, which is not that far off, like we'd be something like 100% of people would be diabetic. I mean, crazy stats. Which is why this is so appropriate today as we talk about metabolism and how to make your metabolism work better because, well, a well oiled metabolism is not getting diabetes. Right? However, we do need to distinguish between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The reality is they should have totally different names. Just like the way you eat every single day, your long term eating plan and a therapeutic diet should have different names. They both aren't diets because there's such a difference between type one and type two. Type two is what everyone's hearing about. This is when, you know, over time your body becomes resistant to, to insulin. They can't really hear it. They start to be less sensitive to it. Your, your body starts to over produce it. It can't make enough to get blood sugar to come back. And so you'll start to see your insulin ride up, but it can't get into the cells. You'll start to see your blood sugar rise up because the insulin's not doing what it needs to do because the cells can't hear it. And boom, you've got this fatigued pancreas because of it. That's type 2 diabetes. Totally different from type 1 diabetes. Used to be called juvenile onset diabetes because that's when it us it's an autoimmune condition where the body attacks its own pancreas with antibodies and then the pancreas doesn't make insulin and then you become insulin dependent. So that's someone who has to do shots, has to do an insulin pump. So very, very, very different situation. And Jane, thank you for calling me out on that because you're so, so right and it is really important. I think as you know, type 2 diabetes has become so common, we just think of it as diabetes. And you know, type one is not as so again, there you go. And for those of you who are listening to this live right now, just know the show notes are not done because we are recording the podcast. So JJvirgin.com metasupport is where our show notes will be. Now, before we dive into the show, I want to share one more thing with you. Stay with me.

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All right, welcome back. So I'm super excited to be talking about metabolism today. And this came up because it's been coming up a lot. I actually saw a little post from Joel Fuhrman, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, who was talking about. Or someone I think might have texted this to me or posted on one of the social media sites about do we really want a fast metabolism, or would this mean that we're aging faster? Then I've got my girlfriend, Hailey Pomeray, who wrote Fast Metabolism Diet, and I think we're actually all talking about the same thing. It's just kind of confusing. What we really want is a well running metabolism. If you think of your metabolism as your engine, we want an engine that's very efficient, efficient, works well, can easily burn off fat for fuel. You have great sustained energy. So I think it's really about just like anything else in your, in your diet or in your hormonal system, having balance. So we want a metabolism that works fantastic. So what I'm going to talk about today are some of the things can help ensure that you have a metabolism that's working great and some of the things that can be metabolic destroyer. So we've got the supporters on the one hand and the destroyers on the other hand. And I'm recording this live again on Facebook and Instagram and I would love to see. Let's start with some of the things that just would crash your metabolism. What are some of the things that you would guess would be things that would just destroy your metabolism that would crash it. Any ideas out there in Facebook and Instagram land as to what it would be? Because I've got one that you probably wouldn't have thought of that I'm kind of excited about. So I'm waiting. I'm waiting. Come on, someone has some idea here. I know you do. I saw junk food. Yes. And for probably different reasons than you realize. And I see sugar. And again, probably for different reasons than you realize. So let me talk to you about a couple of the things that definitely can do this. Stress. Yay. All right, Leanne wins the prize. So Leanne said stress, and when I look at the different things can really trash your metabolism. Destroy your metabolism. Stress is a key issue. Why? Well, it's a couple different reasons. Number one, stress can actually impair the conversion of your active of your inactive T4 hormone, thyroid hormone, to convert to the active form. In fact, I was doing a cool podcast yesterday with Dr. Michael Ruscio of Dr. Ruscio Radio and he was talking about this and I said, you know, it seems like to me, free T3 could actually be a really cool marker of stress. You know, we look at stress and we're like, how do you quantify stress? Do you look at it from doing an adrenal salivary index? We'll put the notes in on how to do one of those in the show notes again@jjvirgin.com meta support. But that's one way I look for elevated fasting blood sugar in absence of anything else. Like you're eating healthy and you are working out your triglycerides. Are low, like they're 50. Your hemoglobin A1C is decent, your fasting insulin is good. But yet your immediate blood sugar is elevated. And remember, slightly elevated blood sugar 90 or above can increase your risk of dementia five times. This is important. But, but stress can damage your metabolism because it can slow thyroid function because of that block from T4 to T3. So that's one big one. Number two, it can make you catabolic. It can break down muscle. One of the reasons that blood sugar is higher is it's breaking down muscle and then you're getting that sugar in the bloodstream. So you can run from the tiger, right? But there's no tiger chasing us. So that's another big way that it can do it. And that is super, super important. And of course, as we know, stress can make your gut more permeable and disrupt your gut microbiome. And your gut microbiome is super key and critical for having a good healthy metabolism. When we look at gut disruptors, someone said sugar, and I'm going to pile onto that, artificial sweeteners. Because sugar and artificial sweeteners disrupt the gut microbiome, the bacteria in your small intestine, the gu gut microbiome, the bacteria that we have in our body and in our large intestine. That bacteria actually can do a whole host of things. The wrong stuff going in there, like artificial sweeteners can actually change your gut microbiome to be more glucose intolerant. What does that mean? That means that you become more insulin resistant, which means that it's harder for your body to burn fat for fuel. A well oiled metabolism is metabolically flexible. It can easily burn off stored fat for fuel. This is super duper important. So artificial sweeteners and sugar, like someone brought up over here, super smart, can definitely, definitely do it. So another one. Now this is probably gonna sound a little bit crazy too. I'm gonna give you two things, two more things that are big metabolism destroyers. And again, I was thinking of things that you probably wouldn't have guessed at. So the first one is lots of cardiovascular exercise. So if you're someone that runs a marathon, for example, and really, really interesting about that is they have likened the body composition, the body muscle mass, the muscle mass of a marathon runner, to someone who is a couch potato. Because one of the problems is when you do a lot of long distance training, higher level long distance training, not high intensity interval training, but higher long distance training, like going out and running for a couple hours or cycling for a couple hours, with your heart rate at 70 beats per minute or more, you actually start to break down muscle. You also create a lot of oxidative stress, but you break down muscle. Now muscle, if you're looking at a metabolic supporter, muscle is the king or queen of metabolism. I like to call muscle your metabolic Spanx because it holds everything in tighter and it requires more energy to be on your body, so it needs more calories to be there. And, and it's one of the first places you become more insulin sensitive, which means you're better at burning off fat. All right, so if you're doing lots of cardio, you're burning up muscle and then you don't have that muscle, your metabolism slows down. Right. So this is super duper important. So we want to make sure that you have good muscle. So I'm not saying don't exercise. Oh no, I'm definitely saying exercise. But I want to see you doing resistance style training. Just did some today. Someone said flex your muscles. So I just did some today. I did some of my resistance training today and then high intensity interval training. I did some burst training yesterday. So look at what you can do to rotate in high intensity interval training and resistance training. Those are two things that I talk about in my fast fitness program. We'll put that into the show notes. But basically high intensity interval training is where you do a short burst of all out exercise. Like let's say you sprint and then you walk it off. So maybe you sprint for a minute and you walk it off for a minute and you sprint for a minute and you walk it off for a minute and you do that to get about four to eight total minutes of massive bursting. Okay, so and then resistance training, you know something where you are doing repetitions for 8 to 12 reps and then you take a little break, do it again. So push ups, pull ups, squats, step ups, all those types of things to, to stress your muscles so they come back stronger and then again more muscle on your body. Two things are super important there. It's not just that the more muscle actually requires more energy on your body. That is one thing and it's really important. But the other thing that happens is that muscles, one of the first places we can start to regain our insulin sensitivity. And when you're more sensitive to that hormone, insulin, you don't need to, your body will respond to it better, it will lower blood sugar and you're able to burn off stored fat for fuel, which is huge, super duper important. All right, here's another one that you may not have thought about. And again, when I was working on this, I wanted to do things that wouldn't be as common knowledge. You know, when we think about having a better metabolism, we probably think about exercise and possibly sleep. But you probably don't think about, hey, you need to cool it on the exercise and just do the right type HIIT training and resistance training. And then the other thing you want to make sure you do is what I like to call caloric variability. I started messing around with this idea 30 years ago. It just was like kind of. It just. What I realized back then, and the science totally supports this now, is that if I put someone on a low calorie diet, and the reason I know this is I was in grad school and they taught us to do this. And I'm so sorry if you were a client back then. They taught me. I didn't know they were PhDs. I thought they knew better. Anyway, what they taugh us to do then was to restrict People's calories by 500 calories a day or have them exercise. So they burned off 500 calories a day. Big goal was we were supposed to create a 500 calorie deficit. And so let's say you restrict your calories a day, every day for 500 calories for four days initially. If you cut your calories or you fast initially your body goes, oh, we are out of food here. We need to ramp up everything so that you can go out and hunt and gather and get some stuff so you don't die. So your body is built to survive, right? It's built to survive a famine. It's also built to kind of survive your own stupidity. So more on that in a moment. But so the first thing that you do is if you like fast or cut your calories way down. I've been doing a lot of time restricted eating where we eat. Like yesterday we had a kind of a breakfast lunch around 10:30 and we had dinner at 4:30. So we do more of a time restricted eating. But let's say you're doing that or maybe you're doing a 24 hour fast where you eat dinner one day and then you don't eat again till the next day. Dinner. When you're cutting those calories, your body actually kicks things up. You become more insulin sensitive, you bring up a little bit of adrenaline so you can start burning fat and get out there and find food. Great in the short term, but not in the long term. If you said, you know what, this is awesome, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut my calories down every day by 500 calories. What happens over a couple of weeks. And you know this because if you've ever done this, it works for a little while and then all of a sudden it doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work anymore because your body is going, oh my gosh, this is all the food that is available. And I need to make sure that we survive. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to slow it on down. So just what we talked about here, this is a metabolism destroyer because it's just going to slow you down to adjust to this new level of calories, which is totally. That just sucks. Can I say it? Because honestly, that's the last thing. Now you're kind of stuck there. You don't want to be there. So what happens in your brain is you think, okay, I know what I will do. I'm just going to go exercise more and you go out and do more running. And then your body says, you know what, honey, I'm going to make you hungry. Hungry for that one. So what we need to do instead of that, just like we do at the gym, you know, early on I used to say, beyond our bodies, not a bank accounts, the chemistry lab, is that exercise could be therapeutic or destructive. It depends on the dose and we need to rotate these things. It is widely accepted in the world of exercise that we need to change things up, right? You would never go, you know what? Every day, every day I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to ride the bike for two hours. No, you would go do the bike. You cross train, right? You do, you shift things up all the time. We gotta do the same with our diet. So I want to rethink the way you do your diet. Because when you rethink this and start to think caloric variability and macronutrient variability, it can help you become more metabolically flexible. And you want to be that because your body then is better burning fat all day long, which is what we want, right? I don't know about you, but I want to be a super duper duper fat burning machine. All right, so let me make sure I've gone over the key points here. So first key point number one is we want to make sure that you're handling stress because stress can impact thyroid. Thyroid. When I look at the two things that immediately or three things that immediately are going to impact your metabolism, the Most thyroid. And what's one of the key ways we can really mess the thyroid up? Stress. Because it shifts your conversion from T4 to T3. Important. Okay, so that's one big one and then the next one was to look at. So if you've got stress. Hey, by the way, here's a great hack and I will put this into the show notes. Tapping Shout out to my buddy Nick Ortner of the tapping solution. Tapping can lower your cortisol by as much as 27% and it's free. Like you can do it anywhere. So I'll put in the info on that in the show notes and how you walk through it. Super simple to do. And also I'll put in the info on my, my girlfriend, Emily Fletcher and Ziva. Meditation. That's another great one. So there's a lot of great resources around that can help you with the stress. But I want you to reframe what you think of with stress because stress will take your metabolism down and one of the forms of stress is again that low calorie eating will shift your metabolism down and another one that will do that. So instead of low calorie eating, we are calorie cycling. We're gonna cycle your diet. All right? And that's where what I teach people to do is one, improve the quality of the food. Two, do a detox. Three, figure out which foods work for you and which foods don't. That is the virgin diet. Four, become metabolically sensitive and find out how you do with carbs through the sugar impact diet. And then you take all that information as you go to continue to refine your eating plan and refine your eating plan. And then you get to the point where you're very metabolically flex. You are throwing in a couple days of intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. Maybe you're throwing in a 24 hour fast or going away to one of those cool places where you can do a multi day fast. Dr. Guided. But that's the goal, to keep shifting it up. And then the same with exercise, shift it up. In the fast fitness program, we have a bunch of different options for you. And that's what you really want to do is you want to rotate between like one of the cool things with me is I get to travel all the time. And I say get to because my mom's like, you have to travel. I'm like, I like to travel, but I get to travel all the time. Which means I'm always changing up my workout because I'm always in different places. With different stuff. So change up your workout too. Change up your workout. So if you're traveling, see if you can go to do some other type of workout. Maybe you can go to spinning or CrossFit or orange theory or some yoga class. Shift things up all the time, always change it. But the core of that should be high intensity interval training and resistance training. And then of course some of the restorative yoga, stretching. That is for the stress side of things. Alrighty. Now I'm going to give you a couple key action steps that I want you to take from this so you can put this into immediate action. Stay with me. So let's do a roundup again. And I know I just did a massive, just like, like brain dump with all of this. So there are Show Notes Again, JJvirgin.com forward/meta support, M E T A support all the show notes, all the different resources. And here's what I want you to think about when I give you this information. I want you to think of picking one thing because you'll hear a lot on, on my podcast, you're going to hear a lot of information and you might go, oh my gosh, like, ah, right. And I don't want you getting into analysis paralysis. I want you to pick one thing. So I talked about a couple key things today that are so important for your metabolism. Number one is figuring out a way to handle stress. So you know, if I'm, if I'm speaking to you right now, if that's your thing, go into those show notes and look at what I have for tapping and for meditation and find that thing that works for you. I'll tell you what works the best for me is my doggy. Right now my dog is staying with my. So while we travel a little bit this summer and it has been. I just didn't realize how, what an impact that doggy had on me. So she's never leaving my side again. So pick your thing that helps you with that. Next one is go into caloric cycling rather than lowering your calories. So that is where. And again we talk about this in the Breakthrough Carb Intolerance online program is once you figure out how you feel with different levels of carbs, then start to cycle that this is where if you did want to do a keto d. Keto diets aren't something you want to do for the long term. You want to do it short term. Same with fasting. If you did fast for long term, you're gone. You do these things short term or intermittent fasting all of this stuff is to create that caloric variability, to create the metabolic flexibility that will help you keep your body on its toes, your metabolism on its toes, so you can burn off fat. And finally, is to mix up your exercise. Now, I will tell you, I fall into ruts with my workouts. I do. I do. And that is. I was talking to my husband about this yesterday. I go, it's so good that we travel because it keeps me from just doing the same old, same old. Of course you can go. And we have a fast fitness program that gets you a lot of options. And then there's amazing resources out there. My, my girlfriend Bri, the Betty Rocker. You can check her out, put her in the resources. My girlfriend, Deborah Atkinson of Flippin50. So there's a lot of stuff out there, so you can keep changing it up. We're not going to be in rut in our food. We're not going to be in a rut in our exercise, and we're going to figure out how to manage stress. Pick one of those. Pick one. That's your thing. Alrighty. I'd love to shout you out on the next show. So if you've not yet subscribed, hey, subscribe to JJ. That's all you have to do. Subscribe to JJ.com. how easy is that? And while you're there, remember to subscribe and post a review so I can shout you out, too. And hey, tell me. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you feel. I'd love to know. Because this is how we all get better. All right, see ya.

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

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