ATHE_Transcript_Ep 440_Ali Miller
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome. And thanks so much for joining me. This is ask the health expert here. I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top. People in health and wellness. In each episode, I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut detox and lots more.
So if you want to get healthy and get off the dieting for life, merry-go-round, I’ll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast.
Hey it’s J J and today we are talking about something I know. Personally, I’ve such a big personal experience with and that is stress and anxiety. Not that I wanted to have a personal, big personal experience with it, but if you’ve been around my community or if you’ve read warrior mom or miracle mindset, [00:01:00] you know, that I went through one of the most stressful events a parent can have, which is almost losing my child.
And so I know intimately what stress can do to you at extreme, in extreme ways, but really we’re gonna talk more today about what ongoing stress can do, but more importantly, what are some of the things that you can do about it? Like, what is it doing to you? Why is it creating all that anxiety, belly, fat, you know what I’m talking about?
All those different things that stress can do. And then what can. Do. And how can you start to shift your diet and is the ketogenic diet going to be the right diet for you? And if so, how would you use the ketogenic in a way here that it wouldn’t create more stress for you? I’m excited to talk about that because it comes up so often in the community
as to when you should use the ketogenic diet diet and what to do, if you’re under stress, we are going to be talking about that today. And I have the perfect person to [00:02:00] talk about it. She is the author of the antianxiety diet and the anti-anxiety diet cookbook, as well as naturally nourished. It is integrative functional dietician, Ali Miller.
She’s a fellow paleo or who has been deep in the research on the ketogenic diet and using it in her clinic and has a really cool approach, whole foods approach to doing that and doing cycling carbohydrates in a way to support your thyroid, your adrenals and, and your hormonal. Balance. So she also has a podcast naturally nourished, and I will be linking to all of this in the show notes, as well as her two week meal plan, which you can get at JJvirgin.com/AliMiller. You’re definitely going to want to have, get more information and get some of these recipes when you start to hear her share some of them. Oh my gosh. That’s all I have to say. And they’re super easy. Now, before we dive in, I want to do a [00:03:00] shout out to Francie E who said, thanks for the handhold five-star review in apple iTunes.
And she says, JJ, thank you so much for your recent episode. Number 328, what to eat and when. Finally a step-by-step easy to follow way of eating that makes sense. I’ve been listening to you for a few months now. And have thoroughly enjoyed each and every episode. I love that you get right to the point and tell us exactly what we need to do and why you’re an amazing example yourself.
And you obviously walk the talk and that was a huge motivator for me to continue listening. Thank you for what you do. Please keep the amazing content coming. Well, thank you so much for that. Now, before we dive in with Ali and you’ll be able to get this again at jjvirgin.com/AliMiller, A L I.
Before we dive in, I want to share a favorite with you.
All right. Ali Miller. Welcome to [00:04:00] the show. Super glad to have you here, especially after all the false starts.
Ali Miller: Yes, I’m thrilled to be here, JJ. It’s going to be a great conversation. Yes
JJ Virgin: for everybody listening. We tried to record this and like our recording stuff wouldn’t work. And then we tried another platform.
I’m like, oh my gosh, I just made me more determined. That’s
Ali Miller: going to be
JJ Virgin: it. All right. So I’d love to dive in since we are going to be talking about. Anxiety. I want to know like, why the heck did you get interested in anxiety? Yes.
Ali Miller: So I’ve been practicing functional integrative medicine for over a decade, and I’ve really come to the conclusion that whether I’m addressing leaky gut or hormone imbalance or metabolic distress.
Auto-immune disease that if the individual is in a chronic state of stress and they’re not balanced in that parasympathetic rest regulatory function, if they’re running on a high [00:05:00] stress demand, and they’re dealing with anxiety that this really is the Achilles heel to balanced wellness in the body.
JJ Virgin: Now, what I really want is your personal story. I was like waiting to hear, I was a stress bomb.
All right. Let’s pull back that kimono
Ali Miller: too, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I was at Bastyr university, which is a naturopathic college of medicine and I was actually. A vegan and I was doing a stint of raw vegan diet, which now in hindsight, you know, I was really lining up a lot of
JJ Virgin: guts, gassy and bloated the, like I did that.
So it was
Ali Miller: Talk about lectins and anti-nutrients. Yes. Yes. Most definitely. And that was before I was in good practice of using digestive enzymes. So all of that, of course but you know, leading into the vegan before raw vegan I was doing a lot of the vital wheat, gluten or seitan I was doing a lot of soy.
I was [00:06:00] eating, like I said, a lot of anti-nutrients in raw roughage. And I ended up going to the same naturopathic clinic that I was working at as a student for care, because I was dealing. Severe brain fog, shortness of breath. I was dealing with racing thoughts. I would have to pull over my car and I was having really severe palpitations and come to find out my ferritin levels, which is a marker of your iron storage in the body were at a two.
Usually you start losing here when they dip below 60. And so I was very severely anemic. I had B12 deficiency and it was at that point that I kind of determined if food was going to be my medicine, that I had to transition my diet and bring in animal products. And I started to transition to more of like a gaps diet, and then started to layer some of these other functional medicine.
JJ Virgin: Okay, well, you just bespoke something that no one will know what the heck you’re talking about, which is gaps, diet. So fill everybody in on, on that transition. Just so they’ll
Ali Miller: understand. So this is the work of Natasha McBride [00:07:00] and Dr. Natasha McBride, and it stands for gut and psychology syndrome gaps. And it was one of the older kind of with the along the guidelines of Weston A Price.
And it is a diet that focuses highly on bone broth and it is a grain-free diet, essentially an easy way to explaining it is like a paleo approach where they remove longer chain carbohydrates. And so it’ll tie in. The specific carbohydrate diet is another term or the SCD diet, which we’ll use in clinic for a lot of autoimmune and inflammatory bowel disorder.
But Natasha McBride started to talk about the gut connection to the brain, and that had a lot of aha strings with me. And I started to find within myself really feeling grounded again and the more animal product that I brought in, and the more fats that I brought into my.
JJ Virgin: So I love all this. I, you know, little background back when I was a vegan and I did, I did vegan.
I did [00:08:00] raw vegan like, cause everything, I’m going to go take it to the extreme right. You can’t just be a vegetarian. Nope. Gotta go vegan. Nope. Can’t just be vegan. And this was, this was back in the days like this was. 25 30 years ago. So I was ahead of my time, but I remember going to the doctor, same issue.
And at the time I didn’t know any functional medicine. I just know that he looked at my labs and he said, either go eat some meat or we’re putting you in the hospital. You decide. Sure. Yeah. I think this is an easy decision. So. Okay. Now let’s kind of dig in now cause we’re going to dig into anxiety.
Yes. And we’re also going to, like, one of the things I like to do is break it apart and assume that, you know, a lot of these words that will say like parasympathetic people. Totally. So let’s kind of look at stress because a little stress is good. Yes, too much stress is bad. So let’s like talk about [00:09:00] stress and how you look at it and you know, how it can, what all it affects and you know, how do we get back into balance?
Ali Miller: Yes. And I think that we can all acknowledge whether we align with the term anxiety. We feel that we experience anxiety. I think we can all acknowledge that we’re under high amounts of stress and we could all benefit from being a little bit more resilient. So when we’re in a stress response, the body, the autonomic nervous system, which is what regulates our, our central nervous system, our brain.
Through our spine and provides feedback to our body. It goes into fight or flight mode, and we still have a lot of the survival mechanisms as if the stress itself is a physiological stressor, meaning like we’re running from a saber tooth tiger or a cheetah or whatever. And, and so this type of. Bonds is a survival mechanism that has a [00:10:00] lot of hormonal influence, a lot of inflammatory regulating and blood sugar regulating impact on the body.
And if only activated during short-term survival mode would be fine. But the issue is that when many of us are stressed, now we might be stressing going through a gnarly divorce, we may be dealing with a stressor of a lifestyle change. It could be financial could be a move. It could be something positive, like planning a wedding.
But if we’re in this running fight or flight mode with the many lists of the things to do and constantly feeling on in this reactive mode, we start to have distress in the body. Which could impact our blood sugar levels. So when we’re in fight or flight mode, the body is going to dump glucose into the bloodstream as a survival, quick acting fuel that can drive even more of a kind of mountain peak and valley effect where we can drop to low blood sugar status [00:11:00] and getting that hanger mode where we’re shaky or nauseous, or with brain fog and looking for another sugar, pick me up.
And that can create definitely. Cycle. We can also have unfavorable blood pressure effects from stress. We can have unfavorable GI distress because our blood flow generally likes to stay in the central area of the body. But when we’re in fight or flight mode, the blood flow goes out to the appendages. So out to our hands and our feet away from our vital organs.
So this means that when we eat at a stressed environment, we actually don’t absorb as many of the nutrients. We’re not in that rest digest mode, the fancy word being parasympathetic place. And if digestion is not optimized, that means that we don’t have optimal hydrochloric acid. We don’t make as many digestive enzymes.
We’re only making about a quarter of the amount of digestive enzymes in a stressed space. And then we don’t have that blood flow in the intestines to pull in the nutrients. So we’re setting ourselves up for blood sugar, [00:12:00] dysregulation, blood pressure, other metabolic distress, and we can set ourselves up for the rollercoaster of the blood sugar response and nutrient deficiencies.
All right.
JJ Virgin: So that’s a mess. Yeah.
Ali Miller: And that’s without even talking cortisol, because that’s a whole nother mechanism.
JJ Virgin: I remember when I first started looking at stress, I’m like, all right. So basically it’s going to age you quicker. It’s going to make you gain weight, especially around your belly. It’s going to mess up your sex drive, like okay.
You know, but yet we’re, you know, it’s not like you can say, all right, so. Kids, I’m going to send you to a boarding school. I’m firing my boss, you know, I mean, we live in this world, so what do we do?
Ali Miller: Yeah. And we have to choose our stressors. I think it’s a good point, JJ, because if we think of stress as a positive, like I said, a wedding or something, exercise could be.
Intermittent fasting could be a stress the ketogenic diet that I’m a big proponent of could be a stress. And so we have to think of our stress, like a wardrobe. And if we’re going to add [00:13:00] on new stressors, even if they’re positive, we do have to be mindful of what things we need to pull out or what things we’re going to.
Because the classic person I see in clinic is the type a female that is trying to do everything. And they’re under sleeping and under nourishing. And it just perpetuates this wired electric imbalance, which keeps us feeling like a chicken with our head cut off, you know, just kind of running around and pecking without really being in that grounded space.
And that’s when we really start to see the body you know, starting with a whisper, but it starts to scream when it has these imbalances from chronic stress response.
JJ Virgin: So. You kind of slid something in their alley about keto and stress. And I know you do a lot with the ketogenic diet and I think it’s really interesting.
Like my basic philosophy on diets is they all work. We just need to know which one to use for which situation. And that’s the big challenge. Like everyone’s like, this is the diet. I go, no, this is the diet for that person at that time. [00:14:00] You know? And so let’s talk about the ketogenic diet and when it could be appropriate, what to do, like, I’m sure you see people coming in, they’re stressed out, they’re gaining weight because they’re stressed out and they’re like, but I’m going to do a keto diet.
Like, you know, let’s talk about a keto diet, what it is when it’s appropriate. When it might be appropriate to do more carb cycling, let’s unpack
Ali Miller: that. Okay. Okay. So a little 1 0 1 on keto and how it’s connected to anxiety and stress. You know, when the body goes low carbohydrate, we all going back to that kind of saber tooth tiger comparison of an ancestral model.
You know, we, as the human body has developed are supposed to be a hybrid, meaning that we run on both glucose and ketones. So, yes, there’s big waves. You know, Atkins had a wave a couple of decades back now we’re waving with, with nutritional ketosis, but we’ve used for long periods of time when food was scarce.
And when we were between, you know, hunting [00:15:00] and gathering models, the ability of ketones to help to fuel our body. Babies in utero use ketones as about 40% of their fuel source. So this isn’t something that’s scary or buzz and shock and awe. But the body does have to be in a restricted carbohydrate state to start to produce a nutritional level of ketones as a hybrid secondary fuel to glucose.
And this generally means that we’re pulling out like all starchy vegetables, fruits, grains, and somewhere around like a total of 30 to 40 grams of carbs. Now, why would we want to do this? One thing that we need to be mindful of is that when we make ketones, they’re a cleaner burning fuel. So they put out less oxidative stress in the brain, you know?
So when we’re talking about inflammation, aging, ketones, and making a therapeutic level by restricting carbs in the diet could be one way to reduce oxidative stress and reduce inflammation. Ketones also cross the blood brain barrier. And this is a mechanism more [00:16:00] direct for anxiety. They have an ability to up-regulate gaba and gaba is an inhibitory neuro-transmitter.
It’s like the mellower outer, the ultimate chill pill in many ways, shapes and forms. If we’re dealing with a stress response where we’re having dryness in the mouth or tremors, shakiness, generally speaking, gaba is going to help to mitigate or stop that stress response and physiologically calm us down.
So it’s a great tool to have in our tool belt when we’re running in a chronic stress demand, when those ketones cross the blood brain barrier, they upregulate the gaba expression. So it helps to give us a little bit of mellow through our hustle. And then the ketones also have an ability to downregulate
epinephrin. And epinephrin in layman’s terms is thought of as adrenaline. And so that’s one of the mechanisms where nutritional ketosis is a tool for seizure activity. It reduces the excitatory neuro impulse, [00:17:00] and it helps to provide the mellow out regulatory, neuro impact.
JJ Virgin: So then what, when would it be.
Okay. To use with someone who’s stressed and women, it might be an additional stressor that would create more
Ali Miller: problems. Yeah. So there’s a complex web of this in the sense that, you know, again, it’s healthy to run in keto and you know, have glucose levels also that regulates you’re off of that mountain peak and valley blood sugar distress.
But. There is another hormone to mention, which kind of creates this carb cycling language, which is leptin. Leptin is a hormone that is a regulator of satiety. And I really feel like with all of this work with anxiety and stress, that the big, the name of the. Help the body feel safe, help your body to feel safe and not threatened.
And your body will thank you and respond favorably. So leptin is a hormone that is made in the body in response to the consumption of [00:18:00] fat. So it’s made in the small intestine. When we eat fat, we produce more leptin and that should give the body signal that we’re satiated or full. It helps to upregulate.
Processes. So it can help with body fat burn and leptin also can be manufactured from the loss of your body, fat as fuel. So fat is a big regulator of leptin. We have leptin receptors throughout our body. We have main on the HPA axis, which is that fight or flight response in the hypothalamus of the brain.
On the thyroid and on the ovaries. So here’s where it becomes important for carb cycling in an individual that is under high stress. They tend to burn through leptin because it’s a safety valve, right? So they burn through leptin at higher amounts. Now an individual that’s also of a low body fat, which isn’t making leptin from their body.
Fat reserves is going to be more prone towards low leptin and an individual that has any hypo thyroid history because there’s receptor sites on the thyroid or is going through hormonal [00:19:00] cycling of an age of, you know, someone who is menstruating because there’s those receptors on the ovaries. If the woman is low body fat and high stress, generally speaking, I recommend that they implement carb cycling.
And the reason for this is that again, the leptin levels go down with low body fat and stress. And so often in a ketogenic diet because of the regulation of appetite. Woman such as myself, 35 year old running a clinic, doing all the things may forget to eat. And it’s a blessing and a curse, right? To not have an appetite, to feel very regulated for once and not deal with food cravings.
But if you do not eat enough grams of fat, the leptin levels can go too low and that may create hormonal or thyroid distress.
JJ Virgin: So I love, I love all this explanation because I feel like people are either on the keto bandwagon or not, they’re either against it or for it. I go it’s, you know, and I get asked all the time, should I do a keto diet?
I’m like, it depends. Yeah, it depends. And in general, [00:20:00] You know, you’ve got seizures, it’s something I would say you’d be cycling anyway. You wouldn’t be on it all the time, but let’s talk about how you approach it because I think one of the other challenges is, and you see it, you see it, whether we’re talking vegan.
Or paleo or keto, whatever diet there is, there always becomes the junk food diet version of that diet. Like, right. I mean, there always is. I’m like, oh my gosh. I remember when I first started pulling people off gluten in this, this client came in and she goes, okay. I found it. And she like had all this junk.
I go, what is this? You know, she had gluten-free cookies and cupcakes. What? Wait a minute. Wait. No, absolutely not it. So, so how do you walk someone through the ketogenic.
Ali Miller: So I think that we have to start with, if we’re using food as medicine, we have to be eating whole real foods, just bar none. Right? So I’m totally in that mindset of, you know, we can’t put the blinders on and say oh but it’s keto approved or it’s been stamped with this name or, you know, this company [00:21:00] states that this is a good thing.
I take a really unique approach with keto and whole food approach in the sense that I don’t use any non. Sweeteners. So for many people, when they’re making a keto version of like you just said, cupcake, cookie, you name it, they’re using a sugar, alcohol, like xylitol or erythritol, or they’re going to be using a blend of one of those products with maybe Stevia or they may be using another form of a non clerks.
We know there’s a new kid on the block called. There’s always something. And my perspective is of, of the sense and, in my book, actually have a section called why I hate non caloric sweeteners, because I’m pretty passionate about it. I feel like if we’re trying to do a lower carbohydrate diet, we may have had an unhealthy relationship with food and it may have been an unhealthy relationship with carbs and, you know, Replacing one abusive boyfriend with another one, wearing a veil that still tastes hyper palatable and [00:22:00] is not a natural profile is going to perpetuate sugar addiction or the craving for sweet.
So I’m really in this mindset of channeling savory so that when this
JJ Virgin: is what I teach in the sugar impact diet.
Ali Miller: Yeah. You know, and it’s like, it’s a big win for me when a client says, oh my gosh, Ali, I never knew that a macadamia nut was sweet. You know, it’s like, yeah. And, and, you know, I like to freeze macadamia nuts and have 10 macadamia nuts, frozen that like melt in your mouth with 10 fresh blueberries.
And it’s a fantastic. Sweet treat. So I really like the pallet reset that comes with breaking up with non caloric sweeteners, and I, for that same reason find value in incorporating small amounts of whole food sweeteners. So I have like a low carb collagen zucchini muffin recipe. That uses a banana.
And I mean, you should see the internet. Oh, oh. But I have to ketofy this and add a cup of erythritol and [00:23:00] banana and then like
JJ Virgin: have the not take the banana out. Om my gosh.
Ali Miller: Well, Hey, right. There’s other functions of the banana as a binder and whatnot. Right. But, but you know, a 12th of a banana provides less than five grams of total carbohydrates.
And
JJ Virgin: I did a big shift too. Like I, when I wrote the sugar impact diet, because my whole goal was to get people, to get their sweet tooth back in check and to appreciate spicy and savory and sour. And so first I was looking at things I’m going okay. We got to look at bananas differently. There are. Super ripe bananas.
Now that might be something you’d use a little bit for a sweetener. There’s green bananas. They’re a totally different food. And that’s where these things can also get very, very confusion, confusing, right? Like, you know, a green banana rich and, and resistant start is going to be incredible.
Ali Miller: So especially if you cook that in coconut oil, add a little bit of cinnamon.[00:24:00]
JJ Virgin: Oh my gosh. Like, like cinnamon is the ultimate Perfect Sweetner. Yes. Yes. Absolute perfection with balancing blood sugar and everything else. So there’s a lot of options out there. And I know that you’re going to give everyone your food is medicine meal plan, which I’m super excited. About two week food is medicine, meal plan cuz
we didn’t even get to, let’s just, let’s like talk. I mean, we’re a little bit over time, but let’s just throw out a couple of your favorite super foods. Cause I was like to know what, what everybody you know, all the other nutritionists are eating out there.
Ali Miller: Totally. So, I mean, I’m a big fan of bone broth. I just am.
And that’s one of my biggest recommendations for people when they’re dealing with distress to just do like a two to three day bone broth reset. Really great for gut integrity. The collagen and gelatin are like a facelift for the gut. And in the two week meal plan, I have a really fantastic it’s a cream of
of spinach or cream of kale and it uses full fat coconut milk and leafy greens that you just blend in with garlic, into your already made, you know, bone broth. So [00:25:00] really fantastic. Yeah. And you know, it just kind of takes away the sipping on hot meat juice
JJ Virgin: people don’t dig that all the time. It doesn’t sound so great when you say it that way.
Ali Miller: Well, I get that in Texas. Cause it’s triple digits here. Like all the time people are like, you want me to do what Ali?
JJ Virgin: Yeah. I’m in Florida. I get it. Although we made some oatmeal recently, like I had to do this on the Dr. Oz show and I’m like, okay, sounds kind of gross. But we made savory oatmeal with bone broth.
Yeah, it’s so good. Like with Shataki mushrooms and spinach and garlic, I go, okay. Wow, crazy. So it’s, it’s amazing what you can do with bone broth, but I never thought of using coconut milk and spinach and I I’m gonna admit it right here. I don’t like kale and you know what? I think that I’m not alone. And so I’m just not gonna, I’m not gonna like kale.
I know that I’m like, you know, this is not cool, but I don’t. All right, so we’ve got that one. What, give us
Ali Miller: another couple. Yep. So I also have an excellent matcha gelatin pudding. And so this uses so [00:26:00] green tea, which is dried and ground the leaf in the form of matcha is going to be rich in L-theanine, and L-theanine is a fantastic.
Regulator for your brain chemistry, it drives your alpha brainwave activity, which is what is seen during concentration creativity, REM cycles of sleep. So it also kind of helps you to mellow out your hustle through a day of stress. It pairs with a lime zest and lime juice. You get this bright green tea with the acid of the lime that provides a lot of.
vitamin C to support cortisol regulation from the adrenal glands. And then it uses also kind of like lime and coconut vibe, a full fat coconut milk and gelatin. And it’s a grass fed gelatin, which is a great support for our gut integrity as well, and works really well to add protein to it for like a breakfast pudding.
And I top that with blackberries. That’s amazing.
JJ Virgin: That is so cool, well, clearly this is why you wrote this cookbook. My gosh. That’s [00:27:00] really impressive. And the other cool thing is it doesn’t sound like it’s crazy hard to make.
Ali Miller: No, truly. It’s like five ingredients. Yeah. And you do it in a blender and no heating. It’s awesome.
Yeah. You literally. Poor can of coconut milk, boop, boop, boop, and a blend. It set it in the fridge and you have breakfast for five days or a snack. We
JJ Virgin: love our recipes, but we don’t love our kitchens and hanging out with them too much. I like hanging out in them with friends, but I don’t want to be like in there by myself for hours.
Not fine. So I’m going to let everybody know. This is going to be at jjvirgin.com/AliMiller and that is spelled A L I Miller. And we’ll also link to both of your books. So you will get the two week meal plan there and we’ll link to both of your books. As you can tell, you’re going to want to get this cookbook like, oh my gosh.
That sounds amazing. So you’ll definitely want to get that. And Ali, thank you so much for both like dealing with our, all of our tech problems the other day. And like, I was like, oh my God, she’s going to bail and be done with no way.
Ali Miller: [00:28:00] It’s a bucket list thing. This is really cool. JJ. I’m like, oh, I get to be on JJ.
Virgin’s podcast. Things are happening.
JJ Virgin: All right. Again, it’s JJvirgin.com/AliMiller and Ali thank you so much for everything. You’ll have to come back and I appreciate you. Thank you.
Welcome back. All right. I want to give you a couple of takeaways from today’s episode. And first takeaway is this is, you know, there’s stress and there’s distress. They’re very different. We’re meant to have small amounts of stress. If you look at it, like when you go and exercise, let’s say you’re doing some high intensity interval training, you do stress and then your body.
Overcomes it and gets stronger. If you do resistance training, you break down a little bit and your body rebuilds. So that’s good. Stress, bad stress is like chronic [00:29:00] ongoing, no end in sight. And this could be mental. It can be physical. So. Piece of this advice action subs for today is really look at your life and go, are there things in my life that are creating some low grade stress that I could somehow get out of my life?
And again, I was, you know, joking, like we can’t send our kids off to like summer camp for the next. 20 years or tell our boss to hit the road. Well, sometimes you can’t, but you can change a lot of this stuff is changing the way you perceive things or making some shifts in your life. So you have some me time, some self-care time, which is not selfish, it’s selfless.
So first look at what you might be able to remove. And then look at how you can change your perception, which is really the biggest part of stress, unless it’s a real physical stress. Most of this stuff is your perception. So that’s step one, step [00:30:00] two. Is play around with now. What I like to do is step people into a ketogenic diet by going through the sugar impact diet.
But I really love, there were a couple of really great takeaways and one of them would be with playing around with lowering your carbohydrates. By first of course, you know, going through the sugar impact diet, getting your. Self back to a point where you’re now a fat burner and you can miss that meal without any problems using that whole foods approach that Ali talked about.
I use shakes and I use bars. I use shake powder to ensure that I’m getting some, not going to throw like a hunk of chicken in a blender to ensure that I’m getting the protein piece of my protein, fat and fiber trifecta for my morning. And I carry bars with me, so I never get stuck eating some garbage while I’m traveling.
And this is where I think these things are perfect to use, but then I strive for. Fresh vegetables, clean protein, eating as [00:31:00] close to nature as possible. And that’s just a great rule of thumb to put in is how do I eat as close to nature as possible? And how do I emphasize savory rather than sweet? So I appreciate the natural sweetness of food.
Again, I was jumping up and down as Ali was talking about that, because that was what I do in the Virgin diet, I’m sorry, in the sugar impact diet is to help you. Taper down your sugar and start to use sour and savory and spicy and salty so that you start to really appreciate those and that sweet food just starts to taste too sweet.
All those added sweeteners and all that stuff. And you can appreciate the natural sweetness of a blueberry or cinnamon. So if you’re still struggling a sweet tooth, that’s what I would highly recommend is going through that process big and then look at how you can incorporate in more whole foods into your diet.
So I’m going to do a big shout out again to make sure you’re grabbing Ali’s meal plan at jjvirgin.com/AliMiller, A L I M I L L E R. And we’ll [00:32:00] also put into the show notes, linked to her books, these cookbooks, as she started to talk about, she’s got the anti-anxiety book, but when she started talking about the anti-anxiety cookbook in those recipes, I’m like, oh my gosh, I could use my peak tea matcha and we will.
Put that link in the show notes too, for their, their green teas. Cause they’re amazing. And some of our collagen and, and make that pudding like that is crazy. Amazing. So. Definitely grab that meal plan and I would highly recommend, you know, the more recipes you have, they just help you think more creatively about some different options that you can do.
And if you heard her talk about, I make this and I have it for five days, such a smart thing, because whenever we make food here at the. The Jim and her Jim, Tim and JJ, I guess that would be a Jim household that Tim and JJ household, we like to make extra protein. So we have that leftover for lunch. And if we make extra, like last [00:33:00] night, we made a bunch of wild rice so that we could have that leftover for a couple of days.
Think about what you can do that you can just use in a variety of different ways, makes life so much easier. You do not need to spend hours in the kitchen. Alright, I will see you next time and little ask. If you’ve not yet subscribed, just go to subscribetoJJ. And while you’re there, you can leave a review so I can shout you out.
And when you leave the review, put your name in there too. Cause everyone’s got these crazy screen names and I never know who the heck it really is. So put your name in there so I can shout you out. Alright, thanks. See you next time. Bye.