You Can Lose Weight without Exercise, But…

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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.

You can lose weight without exercise. In fact, I recommend that initially you don't exercise when you start the Virgin Diet. In this show going to share how to lose weight without exercise. But I'm also going to explain why that is great for the short term but not for the long term and what you'll need to do to keep that weight off for the long haul. So initially, the biggest way to lose weight is to change what's at the end of your fork and your fingers. Because food is information and you want to make sure that you're eating food that helps you burn fat, create steady sustained energy and lower inflammation. Now the best ways to do that, number one, uncover your hidden food intolerances. And I've discussed this on some of my other shows and in my book, the Virgin Diet. Number two, drop your sugar impact. All right, now this is where that subject line is a bit of a trick. Long term, if you don't exercise, you set yourself up to be tofi, thin outside fat inside. A researcher, Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College in London, coined this phrase tofi because he found that people who stayed skinny by eating calorie restricted diet alone, yes, they were thin, but they didn't have the muscle tone and they had a lot higher body fat. You know, that's where thin doesn't necessarily equal healthy. In fact, there was a study in obesity that found that these tofi people, the thin on the outside, fat on the inside people, had this sub phenotype of increased metabolic risk. The bottom line is if you try to do this with just diet alone, you're going to be fluffy and you want to be solid like a rock. Now, you need exercise for a couple of things. First off, exercise increases the blood flow to the brain and the heart. So obviously we want to have a healthy brain, right, and a healthy heart. Without those, nothing else is going to work. Second, you need exercise to maintain your muscles and bone. You know, as you age, you've heard it, either use it or you're going to lose it. Well, osteopenia, osteoporosis, thinning of the bones, this does not have to happen. And exercise is a key way to keep your bones healthy. And of course, you need to keep those muscles strong. I like to think of muscles as metabolic Spanx. Apparently one of the top selling items now in the men's department, not just women's department now, but also the men's department, is the foundation Spanx shirt. Okay, we shouldn't need these things. Your muscle does this for you. Muscle holds everything in tighter and boosts your metabolism. And of course, besides having great brain, great heart muscles and bones, you're gonna look better naked. That's important, right? Good news here is it's simpler and less time consuming than you think to be fit and healthy. And I've got this three step approach. So I'm gonna walk you through this. Now, the first thing is that you're going to move more. And I really want you to move about 60 minutes or more a day. Okay? So you know how we talk about park farther away, take the stairs. Well, I go to the mall and what I notice is that there are a load of cars right at the front and there's loads of spots farther away. So clearly this advice is not one that we tend to take. And a great way to make sure that you do do this is to get a Fitbit, a pedometer, something that will help you track your steps. Because what you measure, you can improve. Because here's the deal with moving more, everything counts. So walking the dog counts. Chasing the kids counts. Going grocery shopping counts. Exercise counts. It all counts. And so wear something that's going to track. So you know when you've done about an hour's worth of movement a day, don't stop just because you got there. If you want to move more, great, but hit at least an hour, and that's about 6,000 steps. Now here's the deal with that, though. Unless you get hot, sweaty and it hurts a bit, it doesn't count as actual exercise. And there's two different types of exercise that I want you to ensure that you do each and every week. The first is burst training. I like to say burst to blast fat. Because when you do this type of cardio exercise, it burns off your fat, storing enzymes. So this is important because now it's harder for you to store fat. It also burns through your muscle stores of glycogen, or energy that stored carbohydrates. So now you have a place to put Sugar and carbs. When you eat them, it raises growth hormone, anabolic hormones, and growth hormone is a biggie because that helps you recover faster. It helps you put on muscle, helps you burn fat. And also this type of training helps you handle stress better. And when you contrast this with typical aerobic training, you know that jogging or cycling for 30 to 60 minutes or more, that is actually very aging. It's very stressful on the body. It actually teaches your body, get this, how to store fat better. Yikes. Increases antioxidants, stress on your body, it decreases your antioxidants, it raises oxidative stress rather, and it also depletes your immune system. And it takes a lot of time. I mean, who the heck has like 30 to 60 minutes or more every single day? And who wants to do that anyway? So the cool thing is you can do this type of exercise. You should do it three times a week. And it's going to take you, if you do it right, 12 to 20 minutes. All right, now, if you're telling me that you can't find 12 to 20 minutes three times a week for this, look at your schedule again. Get off Facebook. So here's how we do it. You're going to pick an exercise that's a full body exercise. And you can do. There's so many different ways that you can burst. You can walk, sprint, run, you can cycle, you can do stairs, you can dance, you can swim, you can do Turkish get ups, you can do step ups. So there's a whole lot of different ways. Jumping rope, jumping jacks. Getting the picture? Anything that's full body. And what you do is you warm your body up for a couple minutes. So let's take you going outside for a walk, jogging, Walk for a couple minutes, your body's warmed up, and then I want you to go all out for 30 to 60 seconds. Now, key here is don't pace yourself. I'd rather you say, at 30 seconds, I gotta stop, than be able to pace yourself to 60. What you want to feel like when you're running those 30 to 60 seconds is like someone is chasing you and it's life or death. Run for it. Your thigh should burn, your chest should feel, you should feel out of breath. And then walk it off. You have to stop. Okay, so then walk it off. And you're walking this off because you raised all this lactic acid and now you're breathing it out and buffering it back by walking it out. So 30 to 60 seconds all out, twice as long to recover. Do it Again. And you do it in multiple bouts to accumulate four to eight total minutes of bursts. You didn't do the four minutes at once. Remember? 30, 60 seconds, one to two minutes. Recover 30 to 60 seconds. One to two minutes to recover until you've accumulated four to eight total minutes.

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Now, if I hear from you, if you say, JJ, I did those eight minutes, no problem. I felt like I could do another eight. You did not do it hard enough. This never gets easier. You keep raising the bar, which is great because it never takes more time. How awesome is that? All right, so that's one piece of it. Burst to blast fat, right? We're going to do that three times a week. Three times a week. You do not need to do that every day. And in fact, it's counterproductive if you do One of the most key things with exercise is also to recover. Work out hard. Intensity is queen here, I'm a gal, not king for you guys. Intensity is everything here. But then give yourself the recovery too. Next part of the equation, resistance training again. This is where you're going to build that metabolic Spanx, okay? You're going to build muscle, build strong bone. And you know what's so great about resistance training when you're getting your muscle mass going is you also improve insulin sensitivity. That means your body can burn fat better. So what I want you to know is you're going to lift heavy, hard and fast. All right? Heavy, hard and fast. No little pink weights for you. So first thing is there's four different parts of your body that you're going to work out twice a week at least, giving yourself at least two days, at least 48 hours of recovery. So if you work out on a Monday, you can work out again on a Wednesday, but don't do the same thing the next day. Give your body a chance to recover. And if you work out really hard, you might need 72 hours. That's fine. Listen to your body. All right, so upper body pushing. Upper body pushing involves your chest, your shoulders and your triceps. That would be like a push up. Upper body pulling, that means your lats, your biceps and your shoulders. That would be like a bent over row or a pull up. And yes, you can do pull ups. You might just need a little help, hips and thighs, things like a squat, a lunge, a step up and power core working your abs and your back muscles. Okay, those are my four areas. And what you're going to do is you're going to hit each area at least twice a week. Two to three times a week is great. With that 48 hour recovery and want to hit an area and do anywhere from three to five exercises within that area. Now I will use, let's pick upper body pushing as an example. Okay, so I'm going to use this as an example. So in upper body pushing you could do something like a little tricep extension and I got my triceps or I could do a dip and now I got my shoulders, my chest and my triceps. So you're going to do multi joint exercises, a dip versus a tricep push down, a chest press versus a fly and you're going to do three to five sets, so three to five different exercises rather. So maybe I'm going to do a push up, an overhead press, a dip and a chest press and you're going to do multiple sets. So let's say I'm doing push ups. I'm going to do 8 to 12 repetitions. A repetition is one time through 8 to 12 repetitions of that push up. If I can get to 12, then I'm going to make the push up harder. If I can't get to eight, then I'm going to make it easier and then I'm going to take about a 60 second break and do it again to get two to four sets of that exercise in. If you're just starting, start with one set and make it easy, medium. But once you get used to doing this, let's get you to three to four sets. And I want it to be hard again. Do less, harder. You're going to get more out of this. It's so important. So how would we put this all together? So resistance training, burst training, all count in that move more. But every day, every day you want to get in at least an hour of movement. And again, everything counts. The yoga class, the walking, the dog, it all counts at least twice a week. Let's get in that resistance training and you can divide that up however you want to. You might decide to do some burst training one day and work your legs along with it. You might decide the next day to do your upper body pushing, pulling and power core. Rotate it that way, doesn't matter. But three days a week of burst training, two days a week, two to three of all of those four areas of resistance training. And ideally, so you'll commit to this, schedule it into your book as if you're scheduling an appointment. Now. Everyone always asks me, jj, when is the best time to exercise? And I always say, when you will. But if you want to get really scientific about this, what I'd love to see you do is get up first thing in the morning and do those bursts three days a week and then find out when your time is during the day where you really feel strong. For a lot of people, that's morning. That's when we tend to not blow it off. But I know for me, it's actually just before lunch or a couple hours after lunch. That's when I like to do my resistance training. That's the key thing. We'll talk in another show about the best way to recover from training, because diet's key there as well. Of course, diet's key. As you heard from the beginning of this show, diet's really key to everything. You know, I started out as a personal trainer and exercise physiologist early on in my career and it was really clear to me early on that you could not exercise enough to compensate for eating crap. And and if you really want to lose the weight, the first step is diet. So I'm going to guide you back to getting on the Virgin diet and lowering your sugar impact. But then to get healthy for the long haul, you got to put the exercise in. So remember my three prong approach to exercise. If you'd like a free transcript of Today's show, text 58885 and enter LOSE. Leave a space, your first name, another space, and your email address. Again, that number is 58885 and enter lose space, your first name space and your email address. In the Virgin Diet I have you swap seven foods for three weeks to uncover your hidden food intolerance so that you can finally lose the weight and feel better fast. Why wait? Start those three weeks today.

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