What's the Best Way to Lose Body Fat?
15 Dec 2025 · 5 min
This is a podcast episode by JJ Virgin answering a listener's question about the best way to lose body and belly fat. JJ emphasizes there is no single method and offers a stepwise algorithm: start with diet (her Sugar Impact diet to find and taper hidden sugars), then consider intermittent fasting, address stress/cortisol and sleep, check thyroid and hormonal status, and use resistance training and HIIT. The episode also contains several sponsor ad reads (Earth Breeze, Wayfair, Monarch, Chrysler) and a subscribe CTA.
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Columbia engineered for whatever what's the Best Way to Lose Body Fat? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert Yvette Cansino from Facebook asks Best way to lose body and Tummy fat Hey Yvette, I've got an answer to this one. Probably not what you expect, but I'll be right back to share it.
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All right, so the best way, that single best way to lose body and belly fat, guess what? There is no one way because your body isn't a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And we're all different. And so what we have to look at, if you've got body fat and you've got belly fat, is why? What is going on? And I'm going to walk you through an algorithm of things to look at and think about. And I just want you to go, is that me? Am I doing that? Should I start there? And what I'd love you to look at is let's like do one thing at a time. You know, if you looked at all these things and said, okay, I'm gonna do all those because I want to lose body fat fat, you will just get yourself completely crazily overwhelmed. And I do not want that happening on my watch. So let's walk through this and then promise me you'll listen. You'll go, oh, yep, that's me right there. And that seems to be the most important for me. So I'll start there and then if that only gets you part of the way, then keep listening and go to the next thing. So I'm going to start with diet, because honestly, to lose body fat and especially belly fat, diet is super important. So we're going to start there. And the diet I'm going to recommend that you check out, because I like to use diets therapeutically for a short time to make a result, to learn something about yourself. So you can take that information and put it into your everyday diet. And boy, do we need two different words for that. So the diet I'm going to recommend is my Sugar Impact diet. Why? Because quite often sugar is sneaking into places you'd never expect. And when it does, it raises blood sugar and raises insulin. If insulin's raised, you are going to be storing fat and it's going to be going around your belly and it's going to be super hard to burn it off. So that's the first thing that I have you do is go through the Sugar impact diet. That's going to help you identify where sugar's sneaking into your diet. It's going to help you identify the impact that sugar is having on you and on your body. And then it's going to help you go through a tapering and transition process to get rid of that sugar and really identify how much you should be eating. It's again, not about eating a no sugar diet. It's about knowing which to choose and which to lose and what works for you. Once you've gone through that process, then and only then should you then move into intermittent fasting. In the Sugar Impact diet, I have you do at least a 12 hour fast, stop eating three to four hours before bed, get rid of the snacks, keep your blood sugar and insulin up. But next, once you've trained your body on that and gotten blood sugar bounce, super duper important because then you're more insulin sensitive so you can burn off the belly fat and fat overall, then we look at intermittent fasting as another thing to add in. And intermittent fasting can be highly effective here for helping your body burn off fat. Plus it's good for longevity, for cellular detoxification, taking out the cellular trash. So lots of benefits there. All right, got those two. Next up, we really want to make sure that you know, when you look at belly fat especially, there's two hormones that really can mess it up for you. And one is insulin. That's why I recommended Sugar Impact diet. And the other one is cortisol. So if you're under stress or not sleeping well, which quite happens, often happens, if you're under stress, cortisol can go up and make you break down muscle, actually raise your blood sugar and insulin and store more body fat around your belly. Yeah. So if you are feeling stressed and you do not have a way to handle it, and let's face it, depending on when you're listening to this, like there's some stressful stuff going on, which isn't necessarily changing anytime soon, what is changing you and how you respond to it. So a couple shout outs to tapping solution. Tapping can be amazing here. Meditation, my girl, Emily Fletcher. Ziva, meditation. We will have all these resources, but find your bliss here. Find the thing that helps you manage your stress, especially when it's a situation that cannot be taken away right at the moment. Now, right along with that is sleep. Because as we know, stress can impact sleep and even one poor night of sleep, guess what? It can make you more insulin resistant. So poor sleep, even if you're eating right and exercising, can be a risk factor for belly and body fat and not being able to lose them. Okay, Once you've done that, you want to make sure too that you have your thyroid dialed in. Because if your thyroid's low, it can make it hard to lose weight, especially fat. You want to make sure that you're doing resistance training that helps you get insulin sensitive, really quick and high intensity interval training because that helps your body handle stress better and helps you burn off fat. Those are things are super important, too. And if it's if you're a female and you're going through menopause or guy and you're going through endopause and hormones are wacky, that, of course, is its own risk factor for holding on to weight. All right, those are some things to get you started. There are more out there, but these are the big rocks, the big needle movers. So pick the first one to start with and get going. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.
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