In this BBHC (Best Body Health Coach) video, Nick explains why newcomers to his dietary program often experience flu‑like symptoms such as headache, body aches, cravings, brain fog, fatigue, nausea, bloating, and right‑shoulder pain. He attributes these reactions to the body’s rapid transition from a sugar‑based metabolism to fat burning, which triggers a massive fluid and electrolyte dump, depletes B‑vitamins, and temporarily stresses the liver and gallbladder. Nick outlines the physiological mechanisms behind each symptom, quantifies typical fluid loss (up to 20 bathroom trips a day and several kilograms of weight loss in the first week), and stresses the importance of replenishing electrolytes (potassium, salt, magnesium) and B‑vitamins (via nutritional yeast). He recommends specific foods—bone broth, cruciferous vegetables, avocado, pink Himalayan salt—and, when needed, purified bile salts to ease liver strain. The video reassures viewers that the discomfort usually lasts from one day to two weeks, after which they experience heightened mental clarity and energy. Nick concludes with encouragement, noting that 80‑90% of participants go through this phase, and invites viewers to subscribe for further guidance.
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Hi, Nick here again from BBHC, Best Body Health Coach. In this video, I'd just quickly like to go over why am I feeling flu-y or sick when I start this program. So I just want to go over a few things and explain it to you. It's totally normal to feel like that. It may not sound like that right now, but let me go through different factors involved in this. And I'm sure you'll understand why you feel like that and have a better, you know, when you have a better knowledge of something then, or more knowledge of something, you get more in control of it. All right, so it's not actual flu or infection or a virus or bacteria or anything like that. It's actually, here's, I'm going to get into what it is. So the symptoms are headache, body ache, Cravings, like cravings, you want something sweet, or you want pizza, or you want chips, or something like that. Brain fog, you can't seem to think properly. Fatigue, so you like just can't seem to get up and go, and you feel like completely run down or weak. You go to try to do some exercise, or you try to stand up, and you haven't got any strength in your muscles. Those are all symptoms of this. You also may feel like you're getting a bit of flu. The reasons for this is you're converting your entire cellular machinery over to fat burning. So it's been burning sugar for fuel its entire life, probably, and now it's starting to burn fat like it's supposed to. Otherwise, if it wasn't supposed to burn fat, We would all be slims burning sugar now, wouldn't we? But we're not. Most of the population out there are fat because they're not burning fat. Okay, you've been running the body on sugar for your whole life, so it's going to take a bit of a transition. The body has to recognize fat as fuel now and forget about the dirty sugar as fuel and carbohydrates. So to convert over to fat burning, Cells need certain nutrients like B vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes. So this is very, very important when trying to get over into fat burning, is to make sure your electrolytes are kept high, the intake is kept high, make sure you're getting all your trace minerals in, and your B vitamins are extremely important because that helps the transition. Alright, again, sugar attracts water or fluid in the body, so that's why a person gets a lot of water retention and they don't know why it is, because of carbohydrates which turn to sugar or straight up sugar going into the body. So now when you have no sugar, you have a fluid dump, so the person starts going to the loo like even up to 20 times a day. And they don't know what the hell's going on. It's just like peeing all day and like, I don't know what, like you've got a leaky washer down there or something. And the reason for that is, is that it's just dumping the fluid. I mean, we have some people that lose up to like 6 kilograms in their first week on the program. And there might be 1 or 2 or 3 kilograms of fat burning, but It's mostly water that comes out. Alright, and the fluid dump takes the electrolytes with it, takes electrolytes with it, and it depletes the electrolytes. So, so you have this depletion of electrolytes, hence the headaches, the body aches, the cravings, the brain fog, fatigue, feeling weak, because it's like this, just this electrolytes that have been dumped out of the system. And these things, these electrolytes, I'll do another video on that and explain in more detail what they are, but they are like the electrical conduit for energy in the body. So you have your nerves which are trying to make your muscles work, and they set off like an electrical impulse, and that electrical impulse is actually— the conduit of that is the electrolytes. So if the electrolytes are missing, The nervous system has no communication with the muscles, so the muscles can't move. So you feel weak, tired, no power, no strength. That's true of anybody who's kind of feeling like that. So that's what happens when a person eats too much sugar and they have a sugar rush and then they pass out and go to sleep. It's actually just burned up all the electrolytes in their body and pushed it out. Okay, so the solution is put back the electrolytes. So you've got to have to put potassium, your salt, magnesium, and some kind of electrolyte mix, which we do have a really nice sugar-free one. And put your B vitamins back in there. So we recommend nutritional yeast, and that's what we put on the program. Because it's full of natural B vitamins, lots of B1, lots of B6, lots of B12. And lots of the other B vitamins in there as well. So with nutritional yeast and you're putting the rest of your electrolytes back in your system, you should be fine and you'll be able to alleviate these symptoms. Okay, so the foods you should really take in this period is bone broth. Bone broth is rich in B vitamins and other nutrients. Cruciferous vegetables, rich in electrolytes, rich in potassium. Like lots of potassium, and that's an extremely important electrolyte or mineral that you're supposed to take in. Avocado, rich in potassium, and pink Himalayan salt is full of your trace minerals and lots of electrolytes in your pink salt. Alright, so then you have your other symptoms that you can get are nausea, bloating, right shoulder pain. So nausea is because you've upped the fat content in your diet and the liver's struggling a little bit, it's not used to this, and your liver's also probably not functioning optimally. Most people's livers are probably running at 50%. Bloating is caused by not enough bile in the intestine. So the liver is not producing enough bile or the bile duct in the gallbladder is blocked and it's not getting in there and that might also cause a pain right here. If you do get that, you can also just give it a bit of a massage right there for about 2 minutes. You just gently massage it and it'll push the bile out and you may have a gallbladder overload. Right shoulder is a classic symptom of liver, liver in trouble or liver repairing. So obviously, here we're putting stuff into the body that's going to repair the liver, it's not putting the liver under any strain, we're trying to take the strain off the liver. So the liver starts to work properly again, and it'll do all sorts of things. And it'll give you pain in your right shoulder, and even in your right shoulder blade. You'll also have a feeling of tightness or uncomfortableness On the side of your body. Alright, so the solution to any of these is we cut back on the fat and we prescribe or we recommend that the person takes purified bile salts just to take a bit of strain off the liver, clean out that gallbladder a little bit. There's a lot of sludge, there could even be stones in there, but mostly it's sludge and the gallbladder, the bile duct gets blocked. Blocked, hence not enough bile going through, and also the, the, the liver's not producing enough bile. Okay, so don't get worried if you start feeling a little sick or flu-y on the program. It lasts, like I say, 1 day to 2 weeks depending on how much you've damaged your body in, uh, in your lifetime, but it's It does change, I mean, it does change. It really elevates you into a whole new level that you're not used to. You start to feel like Superman. You're thinking very, very clearly. Your body is full of energy. You know, it's just like an incredible feeling once you get over this. So, right, I hope that helps you. So don't worry, we are here to coach you to do it anyway. You just gotta stick to it. You know, we know that you get grumpy when you get this. We're used to it. And hundreds of people who've done it, and like I say, 80 to 90% of people go through this. So it's not something new and it's not something unusual. And we've seen everybody come out of it. Everybody comes out of it. All right, cool. So I hope that helped you and we'll see you in our next video. Don't forget to subscribe. Bye.
