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Hey, it's Christy from Lululemon and I'm here at the office checking out the Shake It Out shorts. These have been my go-tos and I kind of think of them as a middle ground between a true run short and a more playful, athletic, sporty short. They have all the performance you want for running, so a comfy liner, our lightweight, swift fabric, even a pocket for your keys. But what I really like is the flowy fit and layered hem. It gives it a little bit of volume, a little bit of fun, so they feel as good on a run as they do just at coffee afterwards. You can find the Shake It Out shorts in-store now or online at lululemon.com.
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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive.
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I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review.
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Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.
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Growing up, I think it was even high school, but in junior high, it started to happen. But in elementary school, I was the tallest girl in the class, and there was only one other person taller than me. So it's all I remember about elementary school. So because of that, just like now, there was a shortage of boys. And so I was always on the boys' team, and I got used to that. The funniest part is, I'm not good at sports. I look like I should be.
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I'm not. No hand-eye coordination. So there I am playing on the sports teams, and I go off to junior high. Then I go off to high school, and in high school, we had the most amazing gym for the boys. The girls had a couple mats and a bar. The boys had a squat rack.
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a bench press, a leg press, really cool stuff. Now, I'm used to playing with the boys, so I just started doing that. Along that same time, someone said to me, because I'm tall, you should be a model. And I'm thinking, this sounds really fun. And I lived outside of San Francisco. So off I go on the bus to San Francisco to become a model.
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I'm nervous. I'm excited. I walk into the modeling agency. The first thing I see are these creatures who do not look like me at all. Like, I remember seeing them and their shoulders were like half the size of my shoulders. It was like someone took a small person and just stretched them. And so I go and I talk to the modeling agent. And she's like, huh.
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right height, but you'll have to lose 20 to 30 pounds. I actually was the same size as in, I know because when we went home after my mother passed, my husband insisted I try on my cheerleading outfit. You know, people have their thing, fine. So I, unfortunately, went, oh okay,
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You're a little girl, you don't know better. I go home, I go to the library. I went there, I checked out a diet book, and I started counting calories. And it took about a month before one of my coaches said, what's going on with you? First of all, she could tell because I couldn't do any of the things I used to be able to do. No more lifting weights with the football team. I couldn't pick them up. I couldn't run like I used to. Everything was going down. But more than that, she was like, are you anorexic? And that was like that...
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wake-up call that you get, right? And I was like, oh boy. Now, I will tell you that thankfully at that moment when that happened, I had this like opportunity. I could either go back to doing the sports, what I felt great at, or I could lean into this being this waif, which I lost like 10 pounds I looked at the anorexia. I couldn't get there, but I chose the strong.
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Now, even with that and choosing the strong and focusing on that, I will tell you that I still was messed up by this. What's happened lately because of the GLP once has been fantastic. Because now we've really showcased the problem that if you focus on losing weight, instead of improving what that weight's made up of, you make yourself so much worse and you set yourself up
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for a lifetime of metabolic hell, of damaging your metabolism and being stuck in a yo-yo diet world. Most of us have like dieted as a hobby. So that's really my big fat claim here is that when we learn to ditch the scale and start to focus on what our weight's made up of, take a muscle-first approach, which I was doing in my teens,
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I just got all messed up with this idea that, you know, I had to be this skinny mini model that if you do that, you will never have to worry about any of this stuff again. We've just been focusing on the wrong success metric. Now, I tried to bring this into TV. When I was on Dr. Phil, what you don't know about it is that I actually had a very expensive, one of the first in-class biomepedance machines. And I was taking everyone who was a challenger, I was doing biomepedance on them, not just weight.
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that doesn't make for good TV. Like if you watch The Biggest Loser, they want to see how much weight you could lose quickly. There is no way to lose fat and put on muscle quickly. It's literally like watching grass grow. So when I was on Dr. Phil, we had a contest.
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And it was whichever group, we split them into two, could lose the most weight in a month. They got to go to Canyon Ranch. Now the morning of the weigh-in, we're weighing both the groups and I have them on the biomepeat scale. I'm looking and I can see what's happened because one group who lost by one half pound total overall
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was super dehydrated, which is what a bioimpedance machine shows you. And it turns out that group, the day before, hadn't eaten a thing, hadn't had anything to drink, had spent the whole day on the treadmill in the gym. I remember seeing them, and they were just walking along in the treadmill all day long. And then they went into their rooms at night. They shoved towels under the doors of the bathroom. They turned their showers on high. They were like,
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hot as possible, and they just dehydrated themselves. And they won. But that's what we're rewarding, right? And then you look at the biggest loser and how they did that there. And then this whole thing that happened afterwards where they had this thing called metabolic adaptation. Did you guys hear about this? Where all of a sudden they have dropped their metabolic rate so much that in order for them to even maintain their weight, they had to eat 500 calories less than this, than what should be their weight.
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Like normally your weight and your metabolic rate are about the same, like you're weigh 150, it's about 1500 calories plus your activity. Not for them, they were already in a 500 calorie deficit. Could you imagine? No wonder they couldn't sustain it. No wonder you don't see reunion shows, right? So again, my whole approach is muscle first. If we wanna fix our metabolism, if we first focus on building muscle, on building strength,
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That will help us burn belly fat, burn fat, and restore metabolic balance. And the reason this is more critical than ever is because starting at around age 30, if you're not doing something about this, and I will argue that I think a lot of why we lose muscle as we age is there's a narrative that we need to be doing less. Don't lift those heavy weights. Don't go and sprint. Don't do those things you used to do in high school or college.
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So we start to just take it down. And the less you do, you know what? The less you can do, right? But the more you do, the more you can do. So these are the statistics. And we'll talk a little bit later about why they're possibly this way. But starting at around age 30, you can lose up to 1% of your muscle mass a year. That's actually not the worst part. The big problem is you're losing more strength. Strength is how much you could lift in one time. And then power, how fast you can move something.
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you lose the most power. This is why when you see someone who's older, they are walking really slowly. And by the way, gait speed is directly correlated to all cause mortality. So is grip strength. Your muscle quality is going to dictate how much, how long and how well you live and how well you think too. So this isn't a vanity thing. This is a quality of life thing. This changes everything. I like to say muscle changes everything.
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Most doctors are not looking for sarcopenia. That's low muscle. That's loss of muscle. And the stats right now, the stats of 5 to 13% of 60 to 70-year-olds have sarcopenia, that's with no one looking. So think of this and tell me if you've gone to a doctor recently where you did a biome machine, you looked at your body composition, then you did a grip strength tester, and maybe you did 30 seconds of air squats, because that's what you really need to do to determine this.
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And without that, we don't know. So most people aren't looking for sarcopenia. We also know that VO2 max is, which is, we now know, this one is the biggest predictor of your lifespan, health span, and all-cause mortality. It's how much oxygen you can consume when you're really working, how much energy can you create. So this is declining. Your bone mineral density, when you go through menopause, if you are not on hormones, your bone mineral density will drop 2% to 5%.
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each year. And then 50% of women over 50 will have a fracture. If it's a hip fracture, 30% of those people die within a year. And I have great news. So I know that I'm giving you some doom and gloom, but I wouldn't tell you all these horrible things if there wasn't a way to turn it all around. And there is, and that's what's amazing.
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and fantastic. So muscle, three things. What I like to say, and it's a visual that women understand, is that muscle is metabolic spanks. People always want to spot tone. You cannot spot tone, but what you can do, or spot reduce rather, is you can tone. And what muscle does when you really strengthen it is it stays in a partial contraction that holds everything in tighter. So the best way for you to have
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Better toning, that's just putting on muscle. That's how you get count. There's no such thing as long lean muscles as putting on muscle, folding everything tighter. But the other reason it's metabolic spanks is because it boosts your metabolism because every pound of muscle requires a little bit more
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little more calories every single day, not tons. We used to think it was 100. It's not, it's like 10, but it makes a difference over time. If you're eating cookies and you're doing exercise, cookies can go in your muscles as energy for future use. So your muscles are your biggest way to dispose of those carbohydrates, especially the sugar. They are called sugar sponges. And that means they don't have to be turned into fat and stored here.
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Right. And then finally, this is the most exciting thing about muscle. And this is the stuff that really isn't out there yet. And that is that muscle is a multitasking messenger. It turns out every time muscle contracts, it releases these things called myokines. They send messages in the muscle, near the muscle, and all over your body. Really important messages. It's like your body's creating its own pharmacy saying, boost your immune system, grow the neurons in my hippocampus.
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Reduce my depression and anxiety. Reduce my inflammation. Improve my insulin sensitivity. Hundreds of different things that your muscles do when they contract. It's incredible. And so the big thing you hopefully are asking right now is how do I get some of that? Anyone? That's the case I'm trying to build is that you go, oh, I need that. Muscle changes everything. I want muscle.
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So here's the thing. Now that you understand that you really want to have muscle, not just muscle, you want quality muscle. The first thing you need to know is, well, where am I now? And so how do you know your starting point? And the challenge with muscle is there's really only two ways to know, well, three ways to know how much you actually have. One of them is through a test that's not available right now called D3 creatine. One of them is an ultrasound, really expensive. And one of them is you die and they do a cadaver dissection. Not useful.
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Okay, so the way you can do this is a DEX is my favorite or a REMS Ecoli because it's going to look at your body and it basically says your body is either fat or fat-free mass. Now, it's going to predict of that fat-free mass based on your age and gender, how much is muscle. It's not absolute, it's a prediction, but the biggest thing we can affect in fat-free mass is your muscle. There's an important thing about fat when you're looking at your body fat. You're actually better off
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being over fat with more muscle than being lean and not having enough muscle. This is why you're way healthier that way. This is why I always focus first on muscle and then we can start burning off the fat. But I know that if you first work on let's lose weight, you'll lose muscle, which is going to make you worse, not better. And it is so hard after the age of say 50, like you have to fight to put on muscle. We can build muscle at any age.
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But you'd be lucky if you're just starting out right now to put on a pound of muscle a month. That's why people being afraid they're gonna get bulky. You get bulky sitting on the chair, not working out. That's how you get bulky. If you were lucky and you worked out really hard this whole year and you just started lifting for the first time, you'd be lucky to put on 10 pounds of muscle. Likely as you did this, you'd be like my client Vicky here who was in the desert.
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who wanted to lose 10 pounds. And over the years, she lost 10 pounds of fat and put on 10 pounds of muscle and totally changed her whole body. Like it was crazy. Dropped two sizes, dropped two inches around her waist. And do you know what? After that year, do you know what she said about it? About her weight? She still wanted to lose 10.
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I know, I know. We are crazy. We have a little, we are, right? We are. The scale has completely screwed us up. So we can just acknowledge that, have a healing breath, keep going. And I say that because I was always the heavyweight in class. I was always the big, tall kid. So, you know, I get it. So what we want to look at with this is we want to know your fat-free mass, your fat mass. But what we really want to know is where is that fat located? Because if you have fat, first of all, if you have a fat butt right now, you are in style. Like, go you! Yeah.
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And give me some. And, you know, fat thighs, same thing. But if you have fat around your waist, this is that dangerous visceral adipose tissue. Remember the old things where you could pinch an inch? You know you have visceral adipose tissue where you've got a big waistline, but you can't pinch because it's all internal. This is really dangerous fat.
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So this is what you want to find out here is where that fat is located. Now, you might do a DEXA once or twice a year. The reasons we used to do them was bone mineral density. We should really be doing that in your teens and 20s when we're putting down bone. The fact that we wait till 65 is like the egg's been scrambled. I don't get it. It makes no sense. So if you haven't done one yet, whatever age you are, go get one as a baseline. And you can improve osteopenia.
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But the sooner you catch these things, the better. So at home, what you can do is get yourself a bioimpedance scale. There are a lot of inexpensive options. I mean, you can buy one for $25. Are they as accurate as a DEXA? No, they are not. It doesn't matter. We are getting the relative change. What I like people to do with a bioimpedance scale at home is have it report to their phone. And every day...
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You get up, you go to the bathroom, you get on your scale. You do not do this. You don't go, oh my gosh, I went up a half a pound. Has anyone done that? Because all the time, and you know, when does it happen? You had a perfect day. You were perfect. You ate perfectly. You exercised. You did some meditation. You get on the scale the next morning, and what does it do? It betrays you. It went up two pounds. We don't look at that.
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Because we're sane. What we do instead is once a week, we look at the average trend. And what we want to see with the average trend is that you are holding on to or building fat-free mass as you're losing fat. But you only do it once a week. You just step on it daily so you can get the trend. Because you can't make any kind of decisions based on one day after the next.
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Once a week, you do your waist and hip measurement. You're going to take your waist to hip. And as a woman, you really want that to be about 0.7, 0.8 or below. You do not want to be one-to-one. Men can be one-to-one, but you're better a little lower. And then that's really that visceral adipose tissue. And then you also do want to do waist to height. And our waist should be half or less of our height. So if my waist...
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is 34 inches, I should be 68 inches or more tall. So your waist should be half or less of your height in inches. So waist to hip for a woman, and it's waist right just above your belly button to your hip narrowest point, I mean widest point feet together, should be 0.8 or below waist to hip, 0.7 is better. And then the other one is half or less.
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For men, it's one or less for their waist to hip. So I am gonna walk you through the most important things that you can do for this muscle. Not all the things that you can do, but the most important things. I also have a couple things for you that you'll be able to opt in for that will give you what you need to do. So I've got you covered, but we're only gonna focus on the most important things.
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I work in the world of body composition and longevity. It is an insane world where people are majoring in the minors. They're all concerned about the red light panel they can buy when they aren't even exercising, right? I literally, at New Year's two years ago, I was at my buddy's New Year's Eve party, and this guy sitting next to me was telling me how he went to this retreat and that retreat and this biohiking conference and this and that and this. And I looked at him, I go, cool, what do you do for exercise? It's like, well, two weeks ago, I did a yoga pose, like right on.
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Great, so we're gonna major in the majors first. I think I couldn't do all the other fun stuff, but let's major in the majors. And I know you had that panel, so one of the majors really is getting your hormones dialed in. We can all agree. I always say you're gonna pry my estrogen from my cold dead hands. You gotta get your hormones dialed in or at least investigate that. So you've got Nicole for that. All right, so.
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First piece of this. Now, putting on muscle is about 25% diet, 75% the work that you do, but you've got to have the building blocks, the diet. What I always like to do to start with, with women, is I like to start first by tracking. This is the Chronometer app. It's free. I like the upgraded version. I think it's like $2.99 a month. There's one thing you need with this. You need a food scale. They are less than $10 on Amazon because...
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You've got to weigh everything for a couple weeks till you get used to this because we tend to completely underestimate what we're eating, but I think we also overestimate how much protein we eat. So all I have people do to start is for one to two weeks, this will be the hardest thing ever.
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You just track what you eat. You weigh it. You track it. Now here's the hard part. And everything goes on there. You track it. And that evil twin, that judgy mean girl that's on your shoulder, she just shuts up. She likes that. I can't believe you ate that. Nope. She's not allowed to. All you're doing is being curious.
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It's just like with the bioimpedance scale. You would never get your blood pressure or use a continuous glucose monitor and start all this negative self-talk to you, would you? But we do this with the scale. Instead, we're gonna use all these things as vital signs. My fat-free mass, my bioimpedance, my waist, vital signs. Not a place to judge. These are just things we're working on. So this is the first thing you start with. And then once you've been doing this, the next move you make is this one. And there's a very specific reason why. There's two things I love to snoop.
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I love to snoop in people's grocery shopping carts. When my kids were little, I remember we were in the store here somewhere, and my son Bryce was like, Mommy, look at that thing she has in her cart. But I also am always fascinated by how people eat.
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Because, and I literally was doing this talk somewhere and then we all went out to dinner and it was a woman who told me she couldn't get the protein in. I'm like, okay, we can troubleshoot this. But she, so we go out to eat and she orders an appetizer, which was basically some fried thing as most appetizers are. And then she had a salad. I think it was one of those salads with the glazed fruit and the raspberry vinaigrette. She turned it into a sundae, right? She had some bread, had a glass of wine, and then she'd ordered eggplant Parmesan for dinner. Yeah.
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And I'm like, you just heard me do this whole thing about protein. She goes, yeah, I'm just too full. I'm like, well, thankfully I ordered a 10-ounce steak, so I got you covered, right? With that. But you see what she did? She's too full because she ate all the other stuff. Now, here's what's cool if you eat protein first. And this is research, not me making this one up. If you eat protein first, the studies show you make better, healthier food choices overall.
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But we also know that protein is the most satiating of protein, fat, and carbs. So you'll be fuller. Protein's also more thermic than fat and carbs. Takes about 25% of the calories you eat from protein to be used in the digestion and assimilation of that protein. Contrast that with basically nothing for fat and 5% for carbs. Plus protein, not only is it satiating, it's also satisfying because it's how you make that dopamine, the serotonin, the things that just make you go, I'm not craving things.
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The fastest way to get rid of food cravings is just to eat protein. The big thing I found out when I wrote the sugar impact diet was people were having protein because they were living on little carbs all the time and their body just wanted protein. There's this hypothesis that says we will continue to eat until we get enough essential amino acids. And so that's why we're just hungry eating all these carbs.
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And so you're eating protein first to shut that down. It's easy. See how that works? So give it a try for a week. Use the little chronometer app, test it out. One of the things that's coming out now is that our protein recommendations are about half of where they should be, but this is especially true if you are 40 plus because of something called anabolic resistance. This is true if you are more insulin resistant or diabetic, if you're over fat, or if you are 40 plus,
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You probably are suffering from anabolic resistance. This is where your body struggles to take the essential aminos from the protein you're eating and then use them to trigger muscle protein synthesis and build muscle. And so you need more as you age, not less. So if anything, err on the one gram per pound of target body weight, but the floor is 0.7. And what I do is the absolute floor is about 100 grams of protein a day and 30 to 40 grams at each meal. This is one thing that will guide you through all of this. It's free. It's free.
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my favorite word, and it gives you protein recipes. It'll walk you through how to, it'll give you the protein calculator. So if you don't like math, it will tell you what you need, how to do it at each meal. You want to focus on your bumper meals. Breakfast and dinner are the most important because you've done an overnight fast.
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You want to trigger muscle proteins since this and get out of breaking down and start building up in the morning and then do it before bed. So you delay that catabolism as much as possible. So we have a place on our body to store fat, obviously, and we have places on our body to store carbs. They can get stored in our muscles, but they also can get stored, turned into fat and stored as fat. But we don't have a storage place for amino acids except our muscles.
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So if you're not feeding them enough, you are accelerating that muscle loss. So if you are one of those people that says, I just can't get that much in, I do have a couple hacks for you. The first one is not going to help you get your protein levels up. It's just one that I love as an assist because of what it does for your hair, skin, nails and joints.
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and that's collagen. Collagen is protein. It's the most abundant protein in your body, but it also is lacking in tryptophan and low in some other essential amino acids. So it's not going to help you really on the essential amino side of things, but there's great research on it for joints, for skin. So I take it every day.
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And I like to take it before I go work out because I know I'm getting blood flow into my joints, so that helps. The thing that can help you here are essential amino acids. What I have people do, I travel with essential amino acids, and we take them when we're going to the gym at home. And my gym bottle has my sheatine-creatine formula, my electro-replenished electrolytes.
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and my essential amino acid formula. And the essential aminos, basically, if you eat a skimpy breakfast, like I was doing a consult with a woman, she goes, oh, I eat lots of protein. I go, cool, what'd you eat for breakfast? She said I had oatmeal and an egg. Any guess on how much protein that is? Right, nine, wimpy.
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What you could do with that is just take a scoop or two. Like I set up my amino acids so that if you had about 15 grams, you could do one scoop of amino acids if you need. If you had really skimpy or you skipped, then you do two scoops. But that's one way. You can use essential amino acids. Because remember, you're eating protein for the essential aminos. That's the challenge between plant and animal is,
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is the animal protein, for the most part, tends to have a better balance of essential amino acids. And so if you're eating plant-based, you need to eat more to get there or boost with EAAs, which is the easiest way to do it. And it's especially great if you're on a GLP-1, hunger's down. This is a way to make sure you get what you need. The other piece of this, as we age, our digestive enzymes go down and we don't
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digest and absorb protein as well as we used to. So the other big one is to use protein digestive enzymes. I think a great trial of that, if you're one of those people that just feels full and bloated after a meal for a while, especially if you eat animal protein, or if you're someone who was plant-based adding in animal protein, definitely look at protein digestive enzymes, huge help.
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And then the other one are protein powders. So if you can tolerate dairy, whey is great. If not, what I've done is taken a bone broth protein powder and spiked it with amino acid so it mimics whey. And I did the same thing with a pea-based one. And these are things that you could add into. You can make a mocha coffee. You could add it into oatmeal. So there's ways that you can start to spike what you're eating to just get your protein up. So winners find ways on
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Next question should be, okay, if I'm eating protein, what else do I eat? And again, what I found is if you eat protein first, you tend to eat less overall. But the next thing that I would emphasize are plants. I look at protein as your function macro to rebuild, and then carbs and fat as your fuel macros. And the next thing I really want to focus on are carbs, but I think of them as fuel for your microbiome.
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So, and I like to follow the 30-30 equation in my brain where it's 30 different types of plants a week, which is really hard to do, but spices count. It's made me look at a lot more spices because we tend to get in ruts with our stuff, right? But what it also did is I was eating blueberries every day. Now I do blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. I go wild.
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So just look at how you can get as many different colors, as many different polyphenols that are feeding your gut microbiome and reducing inflammation. And by the way, those help you build muscle too. And fiber, 30 grams is kind of the least amount each day. And just think of 10 grams in each meal. Those are the two places I was focused first. Get your protein in, add those plants, especially non-starchies and a little bit of berries. And then you'll see what you need after that. Maybe you need a little bit more healthy fats.
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Maybe you need a little bit more non-starchy carbs. Maybe you'll be full, but you got what you needed in because those are the key things that you needed in. Now, I don't know if you've heard this, but apparently we're finally getting a definition for this. The reason that you want to watch out for ultra-processed foods, apparently the average American is eating a diet that's 60 to 70% ultra-processed foods now.
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which is just wild. They did a study. They did the sandwich study in a metabolic ward where they had people eat a highly processed cheese sandwich. This was literally what I was raised on. This, like the American cheese thing. You know, I think when it says like cheese product, it's like the juice product. It's like it's not. So I used to go to school with a Wonder Bread and American cheese sandwich. Anyone else get raised like that?
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Yes. And then Pop-Tarts after Pop-Tarts for breakfast. Yes. Anyway, it turns out that like they took this processed cheese sandwich meal and they let people eat that. And then they took them out, did a washout and had them eat a whole grain bread, real cheddar cheese sandwich. The people who ate the processed cheese ate more overall and...
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They gained, gosh, I'm trying to remember how much it was. It was a significant, like two pounds over the course of two weeks on this versus the other people lost weight. What they found with eating ultra processed food is you tend to eat about 500 more calories a day. You're hungrier and there's a way lower thermic effect of food. So you're hungrier, you're eating more and more of that's getting stored. Can you see the problem? Yes.
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Okay, once I'm going to talk about what you need for muscle, because you can't do this without, but one of the things you can do is once you've got that protein in place, and you're doing the stuff that you need to do to challenge your muscles, then you can do a little bit of what I like to call caloric restriction cycling, where you look at how many calories, when you're checking, when you're doing your calories every day, you'll find out, oh, you know what, I eat about 2,400 calories a day. Let's say I eat 2,000, so math's easy.
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For five days a week, if I was doing recomping, I would take it down to 1,500. I'd cut by 25%. In two days, I'd go back to normal. And I'd cycle that so I can stay on it without causing metabolic adaptation. So to recomp, you got to make sure you have your protein air on the high side. You do that cycling caloric restriction and you challenge your muscles.
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And I flipped to saying challenge your muscles because there's this whole thing all over the internet about lift heavy stuff. And I thought it's just scaring people, right? Because they've got these people like hoisting tires. And I'm like, okay, stop. Before we get there, I do want to make one honorable mention on hydration because this is just crazy stuff. If you were even mildly dehydrated, one to 2%, you raise stress hormones, you then take muscle, liver, glycogen, turn it into glucose, turn it into fructose, and you store it as fat around your waistline. This is a wild thing.
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that you can actually take sugar, turn it into fat, and store it around your belly if you're dehydrated. Don't be dehydrated. Make sure you stay hydrated. It's one of the easiest things. Half your weight in water approximately, and then add more when you're working out if you're doing sauna. And by the way, you're drinking filtered water, so add in electrolytes, because guess what filtering water filters out?
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Everything. I do at least two servings of electrolytes a day because of that. Got rid of the leg cramps too. All right, let's talk movement. How do you notice how controversial weighted vests become on the internet? It's like this total contentious subject. Anyone noticing that or just me? It's my feed. My feed's full of dogs and weighted vests.
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So I always start people with moving more. And here's why. When you look at your overall metabolic expenditure, you have a resting daily metabolic rate. The only way you can change your resting metabolic rate is by adding more muscle. That's it. Only way. Then you have the thermic effect of food. How do you change that?
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more protein. Then you have activity. There's two places that you can impact metabolic rate with activity. Now, people will tend to think that it's the exercise that's really causing the biggest impact, but it turns out the most modifiable thing you can do for your metabolism is to move more all throughout the day. It is one of the reasons I'm not standing still up on that stage. You see, I'm getting steps right now. They are counting into my daily average. You think I'm kidding. I'm dead serious. I would wear a weighted vest, but it hits the mic.
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So we want to do the things that are just going to help us move more all throughout the day. When we moved into our house in Florida, I was going to put a coffee maker and a fridge up in my office. And I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have to go downstairs. So I go up and down and up and down because it all matters. It all adds up. You know how they say when people are over 60 or 70, they should get into a house that's all one level.
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I'm like, no, you shouldn't. You have a three-story house, right? Put your kitchen at the top, bedroom at the bottom, bathroom in the middle, and you'd have to get like, that's the best thing you can do. You look at the blue zones. You know what the blue zones all have in common? It's not diet. It's they live in hills. So what happens as we age?
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muscle loss. But is it really, is it more that our hormones are shifting, estrogen's going down, which makes it hard to build muscle, testosterone's going down, it makes it hard to build muscle, estrogen's down, we become more insulin resistant, more inflamed, and then we get by into the stupid narrative of, oh, take it easy, age gracefully. So a lot of what happens with metabolism as we age is we lose muscle, we lose insulin sensitivity, we create this problem.
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We can undo all of that, which is super cool. So the first thing is track how much you move. I use it. I use an Oura Ring. Oura Ring, Whoop, Fitbit, Garmin, doesn't matter. Track it. Make 8,000 your non-negotiable. Take it up from there. 8,000. The studies are actually at 7,000.
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I just think wherever you are, like let's say you start and you go, wow, I'm the average person and I get 4,000 steps a day. That is the average, three to 4,000 steps a day. Do you know if you just increase that by a thousand, you'd reduce your risk of all-cause mortality by like five to 10%. That little bit, right?
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And what you measure or monitor, you can improve. So what happens if you just said, okay, you know what? I'm gonna make sure I get 7,000 steps in a day. What I'll do is every morning, I'll take that deficit of 3,000. I will just walk around until I have it and then I'll keep going and do the next thing. So let's get the steps. Bonus point for wearing a weighted vest. They just did a study that showed that people who wore a weighted vest as they were losing fat didn't have that metabolic adaptation that you see.
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So, because they were just like, okay, they lost that. We keep putting weight on. But a weighted vest is just going to increase caloric expenditure and put a little load on your spine, which is good. And then this should say challenge your muscles instead. I divide the body into four parts, but you're going to see that I really focus on three. Upper body pushing. That's things like push-ups, overhead presses, dips, upper body pulling, bent over rows, high pulls, hip and thigh hinging, squats, lunges, step-ups, deadlifts.
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And then power core, I rarely ever do because if you're doing a squat, what are you doing? Core. What about push-ups? What about pull-ups? So I like to train to get better at life. I'm not going to be ever that person, if I am, come after me. If I'm ever that like the 60-year-old influencer in the bikini, I mean, it's good for them. Okay, but...
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You know, I'm never going to be the one like showing off a six pack. I want function. I'm here for function. And so these are the areas I focus on. What's cool is you can do this at home. You can do this at the gym. You can do this with body weight. You can do it with free weights. You can do it with bands. It doesn't matter. It matters that you do it.
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So whatever works for you. If you forgot to lift weights, is this anyone in the room just forgot to do this for the last 20, 30 years? Here's what's good for you. You will have the best results of the group. If you haven't done this yet, the first month's nervous system muscle talking, and then you start to get your joints strengthened, and then you start to build muscle. But you'll see way bigger results than someone who's been doing it forever.
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So if someone's just starting or they're just coming back to it, I have them just do two exercises from each thing. So maybe you're doing push-ups and overhead presses for your pushing. You're doing pull-ups and bent over rows for your pulling. And you're doing hip and thigh hinging. You're doing squats and lunges. So you do two exercises per body group. You do it two times a week. You do it two sets per exercise. Do you know what this could look like if you're, is anyone going to tell me they don't have time? Anyone daring to do that? Because here's what you could do. Monday, you do overhead presses and push-ups.
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Tuesdays you do bent over rows and high pulls. Wednesdays you do squats and lunges. Thursday you go back and do what you did Monday. That's like five to 10 minutes. Once you've got that dialed in, we're not gonna focus on this, but you could add in a little high intensity interval training. You can add in some yoga mobility work. You can switch some of your weights to focus more on strength, heavier and shorter. You can do some swings and kettle ball stuff to focus more on power, medicine ball stuff. And here's what I have here that will incorporate some of that.
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So there was a study that came out that showed the vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, known as VILPA, that people who did four and a half to 10 minutes of this VILPA each day in one to two minute increments lowered their cardiovascular risk and all-cause mortality by 40%. That's what this takes you through, what your choices are, what you can do each day. Okay. Things that can help here...
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I have a creatine product I developed just for women because regular creatine monohydrate makes 81% of women complain about getting bloated. I love collagen with C for what it does for your joints. It's not going to help you build muscle. It's going to help you have better connective tissue. And here's the reality. Where we get injured when we lift weights is not in our muscle. We don't tear a muscle. We tear where the muscle and the tendon connect. So you want good connective tissue.
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Myos, check out this product. This product actually helps you increase muscle protein synthesis. They're using it in sarcopenia. And then there's another product that helps you. It's like exercise in a bottle called Timeline that helps your mitochondria work better. Here's my creatine guide. This is, I think, the single most important supplement for women.
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Reotene, hands down, bar none. But I tried to sell monohydrate and everyone got mad at me because they got bloated and retained water. So that's why I made a different one. It's good for your brain. It's good for your energy. It's good for sleep deprivation. It's good for stress, jet lag. I just came from, I went to the Amazon, then I went to Egypt, then I came back to New York, then I came here. On the course of like literally, that was like in a week doing that. Any age, yeah, teens, et cetera.
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So great for jet lag and time zone adjusting. One final thing. None of this works unless you recover well. We actually build muscles in recovery. And the single biggest thing that you can do for recovery is...
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Sleep. I find for most people, the biggest reason they're not sleeping well is they did not make it a priority. Now, there are some other things that can go on, but that's step one is to make it a priority and actually do all the good sleep hygiene stuff. So the first thing you can do is track because that'll give you a lot of information, right? I know that if I eat late at night, my sleep is going to suffer. So you just start getting the information that you need. The other thing, and again, I said I don't like hacks. If I was going to pick two biohacks,
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there'd be these two. One would be the sauna, and especially if you can do it after a workout, it helps. It's anabolic. But this, I mean, there's so much longevity research on saunas, and the other one would be red lights. Those would be my two. Those two have the most research on them, and I actually travel with red lights. So those would be my two. Aging powerfully is a choice, and it's one we make with our fork, it's one we make with our body, and it's one we make with our recovery. So choose wisely.
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Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review.
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And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ app.
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It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day, and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next episode.
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Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional and ask you to do it.
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Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.
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Hey, it's Christy from Lululemon and I'm here at the office checking out the Shake It Out shorts. These have been my go-tos and I kind of think of them as a middle ground between a true run short and a more playful, athletic, sporty short. They have all the performance you want for running, so a comfy liner, our lightweight, swift fabric, even a pocket for your keys. But what I really like is the flowy fit and layered hem. It gives it a little bit of volume, a little bit of fun, so they feel as good on a run as they do just at coffee afterwards. You can find the Shake It Out shorts in-store now or online at lululemon.com.
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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive.
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I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review.
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Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.
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Growing up, I think it was even high school, but in junior high, it started to happen. But in elementary school, I was the tallest girl in the class, and there was only one other person taller than me. So it's all I remember about elementary school. So because of that, just like now, there was a shortage of boys. And so I was always on the boys' team, and I got used to that. The funniest part is, I'm not good at sports. I look like I should be.
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I'm not. No hand-eye coordination. So there I am playing on the sports teams, and I go off to junior high. Then I go off to high school, and in high school, we had the most amazing gym for the boys. The girls had a couple mats and a bar. The boys had a squat rack.
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a bench press, a leg press, really cool stuff. Now, I'm used to playing with the boys, so I just started doing that. Along that same time, someone said to me, because I'm tall, you should be a model. And I'm thinking, this sounds really fun. And I lived outside of San Francisco. So off I go on the bus to San Francisco to become a model.
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I'm nervous. I'm excited. I walk into the modeling agency. The first thing I see are these creatures who do not look like me at all. Like, I remember seeing them and their shoulders were like half the size of my shoulders. It was like someone took a small person and just stretched them. And so I go and I talk to the modeling agent. And she's like, huh.
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right height, but you'll have to lose 20 to 30 pounds. I actually was the same size as in, I know because when we went home after my mother passed, my husband insisted I try on my cheerleading outfit. You know, people have their thing, fine. So I, unfortunately, went, oh okay,
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You're a little girl, you don't know better. I go home, I go to the library. I went there, I checked out a diet book, and I started counting calories. And it took about a month before one of my coaches said, what's going on with you? First of all, she could tell because I couldn't do any of the things I used to be able to do. No more lifting weights with the football team. I couldn't pick them up. I couldn't run like I used to. Everything was going down. But more than that, she was like, are you anorexic? And that was like that...
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wake-up call that you get, right? And I was like, oh boy. Now, I will tell you that thankfully at that moment when that happened, I had this like opportunity. I could either go back to doing the sports, what I felt great at, or I could lean into this being this waif, which I lost like 10 pounds I looked at the anorexia. I couldn't get there, but I chose the strong.
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Now, even with that and choosing the strong and focusing on that, I will tell you that I still was messed up by this. What's happened lately because of the GLP once has been fantastic. Because now we've really showcased the problem that if you focus on losing weight, instead of improving what that weight's made up of, you make yourself so much worse and you set yourself up
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for a lifetime of metabolic hell, of damaging your metabolism and being stuck in a yo-yo diet world. Most of us have like dieted as a hobby. So that's really my big fat claim here is that when we learn to ditch the scale and start to focus on what our weight's made up of, take a muscle-first approach, which I was doing in my teens,
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I just got all messed up with this idea that, you know, I had to be this skinny mini model that if you do that, you will never have to worry about any of this stuff again. We've just been focusing on the wrong success metric. Now, I tried to bring this into TV. When I was on Dr. Phil, what you don't know about it is that I actually had a very expensive, one of the first in-class biomepedance machines. And I was taking everyone who was a challenger, I was doing biomepedance on them, not just weight.
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that doesn't make for good TV. Like if you watch The Biggest Loser, they want to see how much weight you could lose quickly. There is no way to lose fat and put on muscle quickly. It's literally like watching grass grow. So when I was on Dr. Phil, we had a contest.
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And it was whichever group, we split them into two, could lose the most weight in a month. They got to go to Canyon Ranch. Now the morning of the weigh-in, we're weighing both the groups and I have them on the biomepeat scale. I'm looking and I can see what's happened because one group who lost by one half pound total overall
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was super dehydrated, which is what a bioimpedance machine shows you. And it turns out that group, the day before, hadn't eaten a thing, hadn't had anything to drink, had spent the whole day on the treadmill in the gym. I remember seeing them, and they were just walking along in the treadmill all day long. And then they went into their rooms at night. They shoved towels under the doors of the bathroom. They turned their showers on high. They were like,
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hot as possible, and they just dehydrated themselves. And they won. But that's what we're rewarding, right? And then you look at the biggest loser and how they did that there. And then this whole thing that happened afterwards where they had this thing called metabolic adaptation. Did you guys hear about this? Where all of a sudden they have dropped their metabolic rate so much that in order for them to even maintain their weight, they had to eat 500 calories less than this, than what should be their weight.
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Like normally your weight and your metabolic rate are about the same, like you're weigh 150, it's about 1500 calories plus your activity. Not for them, they were already in a 500 calorie deficit. Could you imagine? No wonder they couldn't sustain it. No wonder you don't see reunion shows, right? So again, my whole approach is muscle first. If we wanna fix our metabolism, if we first focus on building muscle, on building strength,
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That will help us burn belly fat, burn fat, and restore metabolic balance. And the reason this is more critical than ever is because starting at around age 30, if you're not doing something about this, and I will argue that I think a lot of why we lose muscle as we age is there's a narrative that we need to be doing less. Don't lift those heavy weights. Don't go and sprint. Don't do those things you used to do in high school or college.
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So we start to just take it down. And the less you do, you know what? The less you can do, right? But the more you do, the more you can do. So these are the statistics. And we'll talk a little bit later about why they're possibly this way. But starting at around age 30, you can lose up to 1% of your muscle mass a year. That's actually not the worst part. The big problem is you're losing more strength. Strength is how much you could lift in one time. And then power, how fast you can move something.
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you lose the most power. This is why when you see someone who's older, they are walking really slowly. And by the way, gait speed is directly correlated to all cause mortality. So is grip strength. Your muscle quality is going to dictate how much, how long and how well you live and how well you think too. So this isn't a vanity thing. This is a quality of life thing. This changes everything. I like to say muscle changes everything.
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Most doctors are not looking for sarcopenia. That's low muscle. That's loss of muscle. And the stats right now, the stats of 5 to 13% of 60 to 70-year-olds have sarcopenia, that's with no one looking. So think of this and tell me if you've gone to a doctor recently where you did a biome machine, you looked at your body composition, then you did a grip strength tester, and maybe you did 30 seconds of air squats, because that's what you really need to do to determine this.
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And without that, we don't know. So most people aren't looking for sarcopenia. We also know that VO2 max is, which is, we now know, this one is the biggest predictor of your lifespan, health span, and all-cause mortality. It's how much oxygen you can consume when you're really working, how much energy can you create. So this is declining. Your bone mineral density, when you go through menopause, if you are not on hormones, your bone mineral density will drop 2% to 5%.
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each year. And then 50% of women over 50 will have a fracture. If it's a hip fracture, 30% of those people die within a year. And I have great news. So I know that I'm giving you some doom and gloom, but I wouldn't tell you all these horrible things if there wasn't a way to turn it all around. And there is, and that's what's amazing.
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and fantastic. So muscle, three things. What I like to say, and it's a visual that women understand, is that muscle is metabolic spanks. People always want to spot tone. You cannot spot tone, but what you can do, or spot reduce rather, is you can tone. And what muscle does when you really strengthen it is it stays in a partial contraction that holds everything in tighter. So the best way for you to have
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Better toning, that's just putting on muscle. That's how you get count. There's no such thing as long lean muscles as putting on muscle, folding everything tighter. But the other reason it's metabolic spanks is because it boosts your metabolism because every pound of muscle requires a little bit more
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little more calories every single day, not tons. We used to think it was 100. It's not, it's like 10, but it makes a difference over time. If you're eating cookies and you're doing exercise, cookies can go in your muscles as energy for future use. So your muscles are your biggest way to dispose of those carbohydrates, especially the sugar. They are called sugar sponges. And that means they don't have to be turned into fat and stored here.
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Right. And then finally, this is the most exciting thing about muscle. And this is the stuff that really isn't out there yet. And that is that muscle is a multitasking messenger. It turns out every time muscle contracts, it releases these things called myokines. They send messages in the muscle, near the muscle, and all over your body. Really important messages. It's like your body's creating its own pharmacy saying, boost your immune system, grow the neurons in my hippocampus.
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Reduce my depression and anxiety. Reduce my inflammation. Improve my insulin sensitivity. Hundreds of different things that your muscles do when they contract. It's incredible. And so the big thing you hopefully are asking right now is how do I get some of that? Anyone? That's the case I'm trying to build is that you go, oh, I need that. Muscle changes everything. I want muscle.
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So here's the thing. Now that you understand that you really want to have muscle, not just muscle, you want quality muscle. The first thing you need to know is, well, where am I now? And so how do you know your starting point? And the challenge with muscle is there's really only two ways to know, well, three ways to know how much you actually have. One of them is through a test that's not available right now called D3 creatine. One of them is an ultrasound, really expensive. And one of them is you die and they do a cadaver dissection. Not useful.
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Okay, so the way you can do this is a DEX is my favorite or a REMS Ecoli because it's going to look at your body and it basically says your body is either fat or fat-free mass. Now, it's going to predict of that fat-free mass based on your age and gender, how much is muscle. It's not absolute, it's a prediction, but the biggest thing we can affect in fat-free mass is your muscle. There's an important thing about fat when you're looking at your body fat. You're actually better off
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being over fat with more muscle than being lean and not having enough muscle. This is why you're way healthier that way. This is why I always focus first on muscle and then we can start burning off the fat. But I know that if you first work on let's lose weight, you'll lose muscle, which is going to make you worse, not better. And it is so hard after the age of say 50, like you have to fight to put on muscle. We can build muscle at any age.
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But you'd be lucky if you're just starting out right now to put on a pound of muscle a month. That's why people being afraid they're gonna get bulky. You get bulky sitting on the chair, not working out. That's how you get bulky. If you were lucky and you worked out really hard this whole year and you just started lifting for the first time, you'd be lucky to put on 10 pounds of muscle. Likely as you did this, you'd be like my client Vicky here who was in the desert.
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who wanted to lose 10 pounds. And over the years, she lost 10 pounds of fat and put on 10 pounds of muscle and totally changed her whole body. Like it was crazy. Dropped two sizes, dropped two inches around her waist. And do you know what? After that year, do you know what she said about it? About her weight? She still wanted to lose 10.
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I know, I know. We are crazy. We have a little, we are, right? We are. The scale has completely screwed us up. So we can just acknowledge that, have a healing breath, keep going. And I say that because I was always the heavyweight in class. I was always the big, tall kid. So, you know, I get it. So what we want to look at with this is we want to know your fat-free mass, your fat mass. But what we really want to know is where is that fat located? Because if you have fat, first of all, if you have a fat butt right now, you are in style. Like, go you! Yeah.
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And give me some. And, you know, fat thighs, same thing. But if you have fat around your waist, this is that dangerous visceral adipose tissue. Remember the old things where you could pinch an inch? You know you have visceral adipose tissue where you've got a big waistline, but you can't pinch because it's all internal. This is really dangerous fat.
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So this is what you want to find out here is where that fat is located. Now, you might do a DEXA once or twice a year. The reasons we used to do them was bone mineral density. We should really be doing that in your teens and 20s when we're putting down bone. The fact that we wait till 65 is like the egg's been scrambled. I don't get it. It makes no sense. So if you haven't done one yet, whatever age you are, go get one as a baseline. And you can improve osteopenia.
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But the sooner you catch these things, the better. So at home, what you can do is get yourself a bioimpedance scale. There are a lot of inexpensive options. I mean, you can buy one for $25. Are they as accurate as a DEXA? No, they are not. It doesn't matter. We are getting the relative change. What I like people to do with a bioimpedance scale at home is have it report to their phone. And every day...
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You get up, you go to the bathroom, you get on your scale. You do not do this. You don't go, oh my gosh, I went up a half a pound. Has anyone done that? Because all the time, and you know, when does it happen? You had a perfect day. You were perfect. You ate perfectly. You exercised. You did some meditation. You get on the scale the next morning, and what does it do? It betrays you. It went up two pounds. We don't look at that.
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Because we're sane. What we do instead is once a week, we look at the average trend. And what we want to see with the average trend is that you are holding on to or building fat-free mass as you're losing fat. But you only do it once a week. You just step on it daily so you can get the trend. Because you can't make any kind of decisions based on one day after the next.
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Once a week, you do your waist and hip measurement. You're going to take your waist to hip. And as a woman, you really want that to be about 0.7, 0.8 or below. You do not want to be one-to-one. Men can be one-to-one, but you're better a little lower. And then that's really that visceral adipose tissue. And then you also do want to do waist to height. And our waist should be half or less of our height. So if my waist...
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is 34 inches, I should be 68 inches or more tall. So your waist should be half or less of your height in inches. So waist to hip for a woman, and it's waist right just above your belly button to your hip narrowest point, I mean widest point feet together, should be 0.8 or below waist to hip, 0.7 is better. And then the other one is half or less.
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For men, it's one or less for their waist to hip. So I am gonna walk you through the most important things that you can do for this muscle. Not all the things that you can do, but the most important things. I also have a couple things for you that you'll be able to opt in for that will give you what you need to do. So I've got you covered, but we're only gonna focus on the most important things.
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I work in the world of body composition and longevity. It is an insane world where people are majoring in the minors. They're all concerned about the red light panel they can buy when they aren't even exercising, right? I literally, at New Year's two years ago, I was at my buddy's New Year's Eve party, and this guy sitting next to me was telling me how he went to this retreat and that retreat and this biohiking conference and this and that and this. And I looked at him, I go, cool, what do you do for exercise? It's like, well, two weeks ago, I did a yoga pose, like right on.
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Great, so we're gonna major in the majors first. I think I couldn't do all the other fun stuff, but let's major in the majors. And I know you had that panel, so one of the majors really is getting your hormones dialed in. We can all agree. I always say you're gonna pry my estrogen from my cold dead hands. You gotta get your hormones dialed in or at least investigate that. So you've got Nicole for that. All right, so.
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First piece of this. Now, putting on muscle is about 25% diet, 75% the work that you do, but you've got to have the building blocks, the diet. What I always like to do to start with, with women, is I like to start first by tracking. This is the Chronometer app. It's free. I like the upgraded version. I think it's like $2.99 a month. There's one thing you need with this. You need a food scale. They are less than $10 on Amazon because...
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You've got to weigh everything for a couple weeks till you get used to this because we tend to completely underestimate what we're eating, but I think we also overestimate how much protein we eat. So all I have people do to start is for one to two weeks, this will be the hardest thing ever.
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You just track what you eat. You weigh it. You track it. Now here's the hard part. And everything goes on there. You track it. And that evil twin, that judgy mean girl that's on your shoulder, she just shuts up. She likes that. I can't believe you ate that. Nope. She's not allowed to. All you're doing is being curious.
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It's just like with the bioimpedance scale. You would never get your blood pressure or use a continuous glucose monitor and start all this negative self-talk to you, would you? But we do this with the scale. Instead, we're gonna use all these things as vital signs. My fat-free mass, my bioimpedance, my waist, vital signs. Not a place to judge. These are just things we're working on. So this is the first thing you start with. And then once you've been doing this, the next move you make is this one. And there's a very specific reason why. There's two things I love to snoop.
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I love to snoop in people's grocery shopping carts. When my kids were little, I remember we were in the store here somewhere, and my son Bryce was like, Mommy, look at that thing she has in her cart. But I also am always fascinated by how people eat.
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Because, and I literally was doing this talk somewhere and then we all went out to dinner and it was a woman who told me she couldn't get the protein in. I'm like, okay, we can troubleshoot this. But she, so we go out to eat and she orders an appetizer, which was basically some fried thing as most appetizers are. And then she had a salad. I think it was one of those salads with the glazed fruit and the raspberry vinaigrette. She turned it into a sundae, right? She had some bread, had a glass of wine, and then she'd ordered eggplant Parmesan for dinner. Yeah.
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And I'm like, you just heard me do this whole thing about protein. She goes, yeah, I'm just too full. I'm like, well, thankfully I ordered a 10-ounce steak, so I got you covered, right? With that. But you see what she did? She's too full because she ate all the other stuff. Now, here's what's cool if you eat protein first. And this is research, not me making this one up. If you eat protein first, the studies show you make better, healthier food choices overall.
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But we also know that protein is the most satiating of protein, fat, and carbs. So you'll be fuller. Protein's also more thermic than fat and carbs. Takes about 25% of the calories you eat from protein to be used in the digestion and assimilation of that protein. Contrast that with basically nothing for fat and 5% for carbs. Plus protein, not only is it satiating, it's also satisfying because it's how you make that dopamine, the serotonin, the things that just make you go, I'm not craving things.
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The fastest way to get rid of food cravings is just to eat protein. The big thing I found out when I wrote the sugar impact diet was people were having protein because they were living on little carbs all the time and their body just wanted protein. There's this hypothesis that says we will continue to eat until we get enough essential amino acids. And so that's why we're just hungry eating all these carbs.
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And so you're eating protein first to shut that down. It's easy. See how that works? So give it a try for a week. Use the little chronometer app, test it out. One of the things that's coming out now is that our protein recommendations are about half of where they should be, but this is especially true if you are 40 plus because of something called anabolic resistance. This is true if you are more insulin resistant or diabetic, if you're over fat, or if you are 40 plus,
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You probably are suffering from anabolic resistance. This is where your body struggles to take the essential aminos from the protein you're eating and then use them to trigger muscle protein synthesis and build muscle. And so you need more as you age, not less. So if anything, err on the one gram per pound of target body weight, but the floor is 0.7. And what I do is the absolute floor is about 100 grams of protein a day and 30 to 40 grams at each meal. This is one thing that will guide you through all of this. It's free. It's free.
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my favorite word, and it gives you protein recipes. It'll walk you through how to, it'll give you the protein calculator. So if you don't like math, it will tell you what you need, how to do it at each meal. You want to focus on your bumper meals. Breakfast and dinner are the most important because you've done an overnight fast.
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You want to trigger muscle proteins since this and get out of breaking down and start building up in the morning and then do it before bed. So you delay that catabolism as much as possible. So we have a place on our body to store fat, obviously, and we have places on our body to store carbs. They can get stored in our muscles, but they also can get stored, turned into fat and stored as fat. But we don't have a storage place for amino acids except our muscles.
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So if you're not feeding them enough, you are accelerating that muscle loss. So if you are one of those people that says, I just can't get that much in, I do have a couple hacks for you. The first one is not going to help you get your protein levels up. It's just one that I love as an assist because of what it does for your hair, skin, nails and joints.
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and that's collagen. Collagen is protein. It's the most abundant protein in your body, but it also is lacking in tryptophan and low in some other essential amino acids. So it's not going to help you really on the essential amino side of things, but there's great research on it for joints, for skin. So I take it every day.
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And I like to take it before I go work out because I know I'm getting blood flow into my joints, so that helps. The thing that can help you here are essential amino acids. What I have people do, I travel with essential amino acids, and we take them when we're going to the gym at home. And my gym bottle has my sheatine-creatine formula, my electro-replenished electrolytes.
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and my essential amino acid formula. And the essential aminos, basically, if you eat a skimpy breakfast, like I was doing a consult with a woman, she goes, oh, I eat lots of protein. I go, cool, what'd you eat for breakfast? She said I had oatmeal and an egg. Any guess on how much protein that is? Right, nine, wimpy.
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What you could do with that is just take a scoop or two. Like I set up my amino acids so that if you had about 15 grams, you could do one scoop of amino acids if you need. If you had really skimpy or you skipped, then you do two scoops. But that's one way. You can use essential amino acids. Because remember, you're eating protein for the essential aminos. That's the challenge between plant and animal is,
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is the animal protein, for the most part, tends to have a better balance of essential amino acids. And so if you're eating plant-based, you need to eat more to get there or boost with EAAs, which is the easiest way to do it. And it's especially great if you're on a GLP-1, hunger's down. This is a way to make sure you get what you need. The other piece of this, as we age, our digestive enzymes go down and we don't
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digest and absorb protein as well as we used to. So the other big one is to use protein digestive enzymes. I think a great trial of that, if you're one of those people that just feels full and bloated after a meal for a while, especially if you eat animal protein, or if you're someone who was plant-based adding in animal protein, definitely look at protein digestive enzymes, huge help.
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And then the other one are protein powders. So if you can tolerate dairy, whey is great. If not, what I've done is taken a bone broth protein powder and spiked it with amino acid so it mimics whey. And I did the same thing with a pea-based one. And these are things that you could add into. You can make a mocha coffee. You could add it into oatmeal. So there's ways that you can start to spike what you're eating to just get your protein up. So winners find ways on
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Next question should be, okay, if I'm eating protein, what else do I eat? And again, what I found is if you eat protein first, you tend to eat less overall. But the next thing that I would emphasize are plants. I look at protein as your function macro to rebuild, and then carbs and fat as your fuel macros. And the next thing I really want to focus on are carbs, but I think of them as fuel for your microbiome.
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So, and I like to follow the 30-30 equation in my brain where it's 30 different types of plants a week, which is really hard to do, but spices count. It's made me look at a lot more spices because we tend to get in ruts with our stuff, right? But what it also did is I was eating blueberries every day. Now I do blueberries, blackberries, raspberries. I go wild.
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So just look at how you can get as many different colors, as many different polyphenols that are feeding your gut microbiome and reducing inflammation. And by the way, those help you build muscle too. And fiber, 30 grams is kind of the least amount each day. And just think of 10 grams in each meal. Those are the two places I was focused first. Get your protein in, add those plants, especially non-starchies and a little bit of berries. And then you'll see what you need after that. Maybe you need a little bit more healthy fats.
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Maybe you need a little bit more non-starchy carbs. Maybe you'll be full, but you got what you needed in because those are the key things that you needed in. Now, I don't know if you've heard this, but apparently we're finally getting a definition for this. The reason that you want to watch out for ultra-processed foods, apparently the average American is eating a diet that's 60 to 70% ultra-processed foods now.
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which is just wild. They did a study. They did the sandwich study in a metabolic ward where they had people eat a highly processed cheese sandwich. This was literally what I was raised on. This, like the American cheese thing. You know, I think when it says like cheese product, it's like the juice product. It's like it's not. So I used to go to school with a Wonder Bread and American cheese sandwich. Anyone else get raised like that?
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Yes. And then Pop-Tarts after Pop-Tarts for breakfast. Yes. Anyway, it turns out that like they took this processed cheese sandwich meal and they let people eat that. And then they took them out, did a washout and had them eat a whole grain bread, real cheddar cheese sandwich. The people who ate the processed cheese ate more overall and...
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They gained, gosh, I'm trying to remember how much it was. It was a significant, like two pounds over the course of two weeks on this versus the other people lost weight. What they found with eating ultra processed food is you tend to eat about 500 more calories a day. You're hungrier and there's a way lower thermic effect of food. So you're hungrier, you're eating more and more of that's getting stored. Can you see the problem? Yes.
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Okay, once I'm going to talk about what you need for muscle, because you can't do this without, but one of the things you can do is once you've got that protein in place, and you're doing the stuff that you need to do to challenge your muscles, then you can do a little bit of what I like to call caloric restriction cycling, where you look at how many calories, when you're checking, when you're doing your calories every day, you'll find out, oh, you know what, I eat about 2,400 calories a day. Let's say I eat 2,000, so math's easy.
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For five days a week, if I was doing recomping, I would take it down to 1,500. I'd cut by 25%. In two days, I'd go back to normal. And I'd cycle that so I can stay on it without causing metabolic adaptation. So to recomp, you got to make sure you have your protein air on the high side. You do that cycling caloric restriction and you challenge your muscles.
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And I flipped to saying challenge your muscles because there's this whole thing all over the internet about lift heavy stuff. And I thought it's just scaring people, right? Because they've got these people like hoisting tires. And I'm like, okay, stop. Before we get there, I do want to make one honorable mention on hydration because this is just crazy stuff. If you were even mildly dehydrated, one to 2%, you raise stress hormones, you then take muscle, liver, glycogen, turn it into glucose, turn it into fructose, and you store it as fat around your waistline. This is a wild thing.
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that you can actually take sugar, turn it into fat, and store it around your belly if you're dehydrated. Don't be dehydrated. Make sure you stay hydrated. It's one of the easiest things. Half your weight in water approximately, and then add more when you're working out if you're doing sauna. And by the way, you're drinking filtered water, so add in electrolytes, because guess what filtering water filters out?
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Everything. I do at least two servings of electrolytes a day because of that. Got rid of the leg cramps too. All right, let's talk movement. How do you notice how controversial weighted vests become on the internet? It's like this total contentious subject. Anyone noticing that or just me? It's my feed. My feed's full of dogs and weighted vests.
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So I always start people with moving more. And here's why. When you look at your overall metabolic expenditure, you have a resting daily metabolic rate. The only way you can change your resting metabolic rate is by adding more muscle. That's it. Only way. Then you have the thermic effect of food. How do you change that?
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more protein. Then you have activity. There's two places that you can impact metabolic rate with activity. Now, people will tend to think that it's the exercise that's really causing the biggest impact, but it turns out the most modifiable thing you can do for your metabolism is to move more all throughout the day. It is one of the reasons I'm not standing still up on that stage. You see, I'm getting steps right now. They are counting into my daily average. You think I'm kidding. I'm dead serious. I would wear a weighted vest, but it hits the mic.
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So we want to do the things that are just going to help us move more all throughout the day. When we moved into our house in Florida, I was going to put a coffee maker and a fridge up in my office. And I thought, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have to go downstairs. So I go up and down and up and down because it all matters. It all adds up. You know how they say when people are over 60 or 70, they should get into a house that's all one level.
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I'm like, no, you shouldn't. You have a three-story house, right? Put your kitchen at the top, bedroom at the bottom, bathroom in the middle, and you'd have to get like, that's the best thing you can do. You look at the blue zones. You know what the blue zones all have in common? It's not diet. It's they live in hills. So what happens as we age?
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muscle loss. But is it really, is it more that our hormones are shifting, estrogen's going down, which makes it hard to build muscle, testosterone's going down, it makes it hard to build muscle, estrogen's down, we become more insulin resistant, more inflamed, and then we get by into the stupid narrative of, oh, take it easy, age gracefully. So a lot of what happens with metabolism as we age is we lose muscle, we lose insulin sensitivity, we create this problem.
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We can undo all of that, which is super cool. So the first thing is track how much you move. I use it. I use an Oura Ring. Oura Ring, Whoop, Fitbit, Garmin, doesn't matter. Track it. Make 8,000 your non-negotiable. Take it up from there. 8,000. The studies are actually at 7,000.
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I just think wherever you are, like let's say you start and you go, wow, I'm the average person and I get 4,000 steps a day. That is the average, three to 4,000 steps a day. Do you know if you just increase that by a thousand, you'd reduce your risk of all-cause mortality by like five to 10%. That little bit, right?
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And what you measure or monitor, you can improve. So what happens if you just said, okay, you know what? I'm gonna make sure I get 7,000 steps in a day. What I'll do is every morning, I'll take that deficit of 3,000. I will just walk around until I have it and then I'll keep going and do the next thing. So let's get the steps. Bonus point for wearing a weighted vest. They just did a study that showed that people who wore a weighted vest as they were losing fat didn't have that metabolic adaptation that you see.
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So, because they were just like, okay, they lost that. We keep putting weight on. But a weighted vest is just going to increase caloric expenditure and put a little load on your spine, which is good. And then this should say challenge your muscles instead. I divide the body into four parts, but you're going to see that I really focus on three. Upper body pushing. That's things like push-ups, overhead presses, dips, upper body pulling, bent over rows, high pulls, hip and thigh hinging, squats, lunges, step-ups, deadlifts.
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And then power core, I rarely ever do because if you're doing a squat, what are you doing? Core. What about push-ups? What about pull-ups? So I like to train to get better at life. I'm not going to be ever that person, if I am, come after me. If I'm ever that like the 60-year-old influencer in the bikini, I mean, it's good for them. Okay, but...
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You know, I'm never going to be the one like showing off a six pack. I want function. I'm here for function. And so these are the areas I focus on. What's cool is you can do this at home. You can do this at the gym. You can do this with body weight. You can do it with free weights. You can do it with bands. It doesn't matter. It matters that you do it.
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So whatever works for you. If you forgot to lift weights, is this anyone in the room just forgot to do this for the last 20, 30 years? Here's what's good for you. You will have the best results of the group. If you haven't done this yet, the first month's nervous system muscle talking, and then you start to get your joints strengthened, and then you start to build muscle. But you'll see way bigger results than someone who's been doing it forever.
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So if someone's just starting or they're just coming back to it, I have them just do two exercises from each thing. So maybe you're doing push-ups and overhead presses for your pushing. You're doing pull-ups and bent over rows for your pulling. And you're doing hip and thigh hinging. You're doing squats and lunges. So you do two exercises per body group. You do it two times a week. You do it two sets per exercise. Do you know what this could look like if you're, is anyone going to tell me they don't have time? Anyone daring to do that? Because here's what you could do. Monday, you do overhead presses and push-ups.
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Tuesdays you do bent over rows and high pulls. Wednesdays you do squats and lunges. Thursday you go back and do what you did Monday. That's like five to 10 minutes. Once you've got that dialed in, we're not gonna focus on this, but you could add in a little high intensity interval training. You can add in some yoga mobility work. You can switch some of your weights to focus more on strength, heavier and shorter. You can do some swings and kettle ball stuff to focus more on power, medicine ball stuff. And here's what I have here that will incorporate some of that.
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So there was a study that came out that showed the vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, known as VILPA, that people who did four and a half to 10 minutes of this VILPA each day in one to two minute increments lowered their cardiovascular risk and all-cause mortality by 40%. That's what this takes you through, what your choices are, what you can do each day. Okay. Things that can help here...
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I have a creatine product I developed just for women because regular creatine monohydrate makes 81% of women complain about getting bloated. I love collagen with C for what it does for your joints. It's not going to help you build muscle. It's going to help you have better connective tissue. And here's the reality. Where we get injured when we lift weights is not in our muscle. We don't tear a muscle. We tear where the muscle and the tendon connect. So you want good connective tissue.
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Myos, check out this product. This product actually helps you increase muscle protein synthesis. They're using it in sarcopenia. And then there's another product that helps you. It's like exercise in a bottle called Timeline that helps your mitochondria work better. Here's my creatine guide. This is, I think, the single most important supplement for women.
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Reotene, hands down, bar none. But I tried to sell monohydrate and everyone got mad at me because they got bloated and retained water. So that's why I made a different one. It's good for your brain. It's good for your energy. It's good for sleep deprivation. It's good for stress, jet lag. I just came from, I went to the Amazon, then I went to Egypt, then I came back to New York, then I came here. On the course of like literally, that was like in a week doing that. Any age, yeah, teens, et cetera.
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So great for jet lag and time zone adjusting. One final thing. None of this works unless you recover well. We actually build muscles in recovery. And the single biggest thing that you can do for recovery is...
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Sleep. I find for most people, the biggest reason they're not sleeping well is they did not make it a priority. Now, there are some other things that can go on, but that's step one is to make it a priority and actually do all the good sleep hygiene stuff. So the first thing you can do is track because that'll give you a lot of information, right? I know that if I eat late at night, my sleep is going to suffer. So you just start getting the information that you need. The other thing, and again, I said I don't like hacks. If I was going to pick two biohacks,
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there'd be these two. One would be the sauna, and especially if you can do it after a workout, it helps. It's anabolic. But this, I mean, there's so much longevity research on saunas, and the other one would be red lights. Those would be my two. Those two have the most research on them, and I actually travel with red lights. So those would be my two. Aging powerfully is a choice, and it's one we make with our fork, it's one we make with our body, and it's one we make with our recovery. So choose wisely.
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Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review.
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And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ app.
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It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day, and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next episode.
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Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional and ask you to do it.
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Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.
