“Boundaries Are Your Best Biohack” — JJ Virgin on Women’s Health, Power, and Navigating a Male-Dominated Industry

What does it really mean to be a powerful woman, especially when your body, your health, and your identity are constantly evolving? Welcome back to Everyday Ancestral, the podcast where we explore how ancient wisdom meets modern living through food, health, and human connection. I'm your host, James Barry. Today's guest, JJ Virgin, joins us to share hard-earned wisdom from training celebrities navigating personal tragedy, and busting health myths that keep women stuck. We talk midlife must-dos, nutrition fads versus ancestral truths, and why listening to your body might be the most radical thing you can do. Please enjoy JJ Virgin. JJ, thank you so much for joining me today.

Excited to be here.

Yeah. I'm still kind of shocked. Like I would say that I'm, I was personal chefing way back in the day as well, but you were training people and I'm still shocked that we didn't actually overlap or have similar clients. But I'm mostly curious, like I know this is a male-dominated industry, particularly trainers. Every person I worked for always had a male trainer. They had a female nutritionist and a male trainer, but here you were a female, a very strong female in a very male-dominated industry? Like, what was that like?

I never noticed. You know, what's so funny is the reality is when I started personal training, there weren't personal trainers. There were coaches. And it was me, as far as I know, like Mark Sisson, Body by Jake, and Tony Horton. What was crazy back then is I would take my clients on field trips down to Gold's Gym. They didn't have trainers. Anyone could come in, you know, and there were just a couple of us. Then all of a sudden it exploded and became a thing. I love where it is. And honestly, I think females are actually better suited to be trainers than men. That's my opinion. Here's the reality, especially for men, we're better suited. We can get away with stuff with those guys. They'll do stuff for us they wouldn't necessarily do for a male trainer. I mean, it's the truth, right? It's reality.

It's totally true.

They don't want to look like a wimp in front of a gal, you know, especially if I've just gone and picked up the weights that I'm going to have them lift and handed them to them.

It's such a good point. Was there ever an issue of like, here you were, a young woman, you know, you're trying to make money. Was there ever an issue of like drawing boundaries or just—

Of course. However, I think it's also how you set things up. You know, I did not wear overtly sexual clothing. I didn't set up anything to be flirty. Like none of that ever happened. And the reality is, in all the years of training, I'm thinking of 3 times that I got hit on, and it was even those times, it was very easy to shut it down quickly.

That's super impressive given that so many women, like the whole MeToo movement was about how before that women were feeling like, oh, I have to do this to get ahead, right? That was kind of this unspoken reality. So super impressive you had boundaries then.

Well, who knows where I would be if I like didn't have boundaries? Okay, here's a crazy story I've never told before. I was going into a little coffee shop in Brentwood, California on a, I don't know, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, getting an Americano. And this man came out afterwards and asked me if I was a model, like those lame things you get asked all the time when you're 6 feet tall. And I said, no. And he goes, well, would you like to be? Because I've got a leather, Italian leather line and we're booking new models and it pays X amount. I go, well, maybe. And he goes, meet me up at the— I forget where it was, like Hotel Bel Air. We'll talk about it. And I'm like, okay.

Uh.

So I go up there. Okay, so here's the wildest thing. Now, I already am thinking this is absolutely BS, but let's hear him out. I'm safe. I'm in a public place. It'll be fine. So I sit down and the guy's got 3 envelopes. The first card, he said, you know, open the cards up. And the first card was, you know, you have to kiss a bunch of frogs to find your handsome prince. I don't remember what the second card was. And I'm like looking at this dude and he goes, so how much? And now remember, I'm an undergrad at UCLA at the time. I am working 5 jobs. I have a scholarship to UCLA, but I'm also working all these jobs. I'm running an aerobics studio. I'm personal training, all this stuff, right? And, you know, I'm making good money for me in the '80s, but still. He goes, well, how much would you need? Like, what would be your dream amount of money to make each month? And here's what's funny. I was like, wow, $15,000. I thought this was an enormous sum, right? And he goes, open the last envelope. And the last envelope was really thick. And the last envelope was hundreds. It was just hundreds and hundreds. And he's like, that's $15,000. I don't know if it was because I didn't count it. I just looked at him and he proceeded to tell me that he would set me up in a condo. He'd get me a Jaguar. I'd have a black American Express card, blah, blah, blah. I'm looking at him like, I'm like, do you know what's so funny? I say this to him. I go, you probably picked the one gal in LA who's going to turn this one down? Like, they're all around you. You know, why would you have picked me?

There is some crazy stories from that kind of stuff. I knew a woman where a famous writer was doing that, but not sexual at all. But they were paying for all these bills just to support her and trying to make her— I mean, there was just some crazy stuff that went down. So I'm blown away that you navigated that just with these strong boundaries at such a young age. It's just so rare.

I don't have great boundaries in all areas, I will say, but I always had a boundary there because here's my thought process. I thought the minute you cross that boundary, you're done. You just destroyed the probably most precious thing out there. Like, you know, you just destroyed your chance of ever having a real, a real relationship. It just didn't work for me. Now, other people may be able to do that and jump on into other things and be fine, but I knew for me, I wouldn't.

Now you just mentioned you do struggle with some boundaries. Where, where do you struggle there?

Don't we all struggle with some boundaries?

Yeah, but I'm so curious because you seem— I mean, I think to the person who meets you, they're like, gosh, JJ's got it together. She's physically strong. She's a strong person. She's a go-getter, a go-giver.

No one has it together. Everyone has their stuff.

What's your struggle?

What you would think looking at me is that I am the most disciplined mother on the planet. Also a very disciplined dog owner. Nope. Those two totally suck at, you know.

You're ruled by your dog.

And it's funny, I keep thinking about, you know, if Tim and I raised kids, together, it would've been kind of pathetic because both of us, like the dog will go poop on the carpet. You know, my son Bryce is absolutely fantastic about punishing her and getting her to stop doing that. We're both like, oh, it's okay. You know? Okay.

That's super fun. Um, going back to the training though, so you've, you've trained some of the most high-performance celebrities out there. What, what have you learned though about discipline, mindset, and health that most everyday women are overlooking.

So what's interesting when you train celebrities is they have to do this for their career. Like, I trained a lot of news anchors and then celebrities. I'd get them ready for different films. And when it's your career, you take it like it's a job. Think if we all approached our health as if it was our number one job, because it should be, right? I mean, how different would things be? And I'll tell you the other interesting group that I trained. You know, I started doing training and nutrition because it was like one without the other didn't really work. So that meant more school. But what I really saw was the men. So I had pretty much a 50/50 split of men and women clients. And the men were really easy. You told the men what to do. The men got their support team around them to create all the stuff so that their schedule was set up correctly for them for their training. If there was supposed to be a massage therapist, they were coming over, their food was correct. Everything was set up for them. And they just showed up to do the work. The women, not the case. They put themselves last. They put everything else in front of that. They didn't prioritize this. You know, I was like, oh my gosh, come on. Just that little thing that you look at and you go, women, you need to stop putting yourself last on the list. Put yourself at the top of the list. That whole oxygen mask on you first is true. No one listens to it, but you gotta do it. The reality is, if you want to be a great mom role model, guess what? They're watching you. So if they're watching you not take care of yourself, they're not going to take care of themselves.

It's such a good point. I have to wonder if that is why we're seeing that kind of boomerang effect right now, because it feels like so many of the topics right now are about not only women empowerment, but women's health. Like we're seeing a lot about menopause. I see it all over social media now, and I never used to see it.

Well, it might be what you're following. I see palm cheese and chihuahuas all over.

So it's probably my age. Yeah, that's true.

Here's what's interesting. Women can put themselves second or third or fourth or probably 10th, if they're even on the list, for years and years and years and years and years until they start to get into perimenopause. And they can even blow it off for a while into perimenopause until it takes them down. And that's what you're finally seeing is we have a big margin for error until we get to there. And the reality is, the more you drive yourself, the harder you are on yourself, the faster you're gonna get into perimenopause. Like, you can trigger that thing early if you're not careful. So I think the reason you're seeing so much of it is it's just something that makes you stop and pause and go, all right, I'm gonna have to address this because I can't handle it. Whether it's the emotional side of it, the physical changes, the brain fog. I mean, there's so many things that happen during this time. Some people get all of them, some people get one of them, but it's pretty much impossible to ignore.

I feel like though, that what happens, I've talked about this before on the podcast, is that really health is such a challenging thing for people to improve or make changes to, like what they eat, because we're so stuck in our ways. And what I find is that most people don't make changes unless they're sick or someone they love gets sick or dies. What would be 3 things that you wish every woman would start doing now before there's symptoms that are screaming at them?

Honestly, I think we gotta reframe the question. I had a great nutrition mentor early on who said, add before you take away. I think one of the biggest mistakes we think in nutrition is taking away before we're adding. And then I love Tim Ferriss's question of like, what if it were easy? What if it were easy? What if we looked at things that we could start to put into our daily life? What if we added before we started taking away? And with women, I think the most important thing with women is to ditch the traditional scale, 'cause it has destroyed us. It has totally ruined our whole relationship with our bodies. Mental health, metabolic health, and metabolism, because it's made us track the wrong metric for success. If I want to lose a lot of weight, what I need to do is stop all resistance training. I need to just kind of run around as much as possible and starve myself, and I will drop muscle like nobody's business, and I'll be a soft, flabby, unhealthy, sarcopenic, frail human. And that's what the scale would tell you to do. So the first thing we need to do In terms of women is really track what matters. And the reality is you can't do that with a traditional scale. You have to get a bioimpedance scale. I'm checking out right now because apparently now you can even do it with your phone and some measurements. But what we're really trying to get to is how much of your body is fat-free mass. That's everything but fat. And to focus actually on improving that before you even start to worry about losing fat. We were taught the exact opposite in grad school. In grad school, I was literally taught, do not have someone lose weight, lift weights until they lose the weight. Can you imagine that? Do not have someone lift weights till they lose the weight.

No one would ever lift weights.

You saw it happen on The Biggest Loser. If you focus on losing lots of weight, you're going to create metabolic adaptation. It's going to happen where you start to burn less calories than you should at the weight that you are. So you've got to focus first on building that muscle that will improve your insulin sensitivity, will give carbohydrates a place to land. It's a sugar sponge that will start to support a better metabolism. It's actually going to help you lose fat, especially if you then do the second thing, which is eat to support the muscles. So eat protein first, eat carbohydrates that are rich in fibers and whole. You know, if you eat to support your muscles, a whole lot of shift happens without you even trying.

That's really good advice. I mean, it feels like what's happening is that there's a lot of confusion. There's almost too much information out there now, and that people don't know Where to start? For the person that is feeling kind of stuck, is there just kind of even one thing that you would recommend they do just to kind of start shifting, whether it's a mindset or their body or anything of that sort, to just start down this path?

I think it always has to start with your mindset. I think that's the single most important thing. You know, I was doing a talk and someone in the audience said, how do we avoid You know, the rebound weight gain. I mean, if you look at the average diet out there, 95% recidivism rate within 5 years. How do we avoid that? And I said, the way you avoid it is to find fitter friends. I actually put that out online and got attacked. You know, you're telling me to dump my friends? I go, I didn't say that. What I said is get around some people who will challenge you, who live a fitness lifestyle. Because, you know, if you're hanging out with me, we're not staying out till 1 in the morning. I go to bed at 9 or 10. I get up early, I'm gonna work out, we're gonna eat healthy. It's not a thing. So it's not even an issue. You wouldn't have an issue being with me because you'd just be living healthy. And what the research shows is that just like that Jim Rohn quote of, you are the average income of the 5 people you hang out with.

Yeah.

You're actually the average body composition of the 5 people you hang out with. And even if they're across the country in a best friend, we tend to be like those people we spend the most time with.

I absolutely believe in that, what you're saying. That's been my experience as well. I'm curious though, you are known for embracing cutting-edge science, but what do you think we've lost from ancestral wisdom that's essential to reclaim, especially for women?

I love all the ancestral stuff. I like the bro stuff, and I like the lab stuff, and I think we all need to get along. I'm really irritated by what I'm seeing online where the, you know, lab scientists are attacking the health influencers. I'm looking at it and going, We need everybody. We do need to be careful if you're like just spouting off, like do some research. However, we need to have the lab science, then we need to take that into the real world and try it. And sometimes the bro science, like the stuff I saw happening at Gold's Gym for decades, lends itself to then get studied. So everyone, I think, needs to get along. And if you look back, one of the first things that happened in my nutrition career, that's just wild when I think about how fortuitous this was, is I ended up in a small room. There were maybe 12 of us with Dr. Loren Cordain.

For anyone that doesn't know, paleo diet father, basically, right?

Yeah. This was way before he wrote the book. This was actually, I was working with Designs for Health and they paid him to do a lecture on Paleolithic nutrition because they based their whole company on paleo principles. And as I was listening to this, I'm like, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. The challenge we have nowadays is we have 2 things that we are faced with that are so far beyond, you know, outside of ancestral nutrition, that being circadian rhythm disruption. I mean, like lights and tech, all the stuff. If you look at what's single most important thing, it's like get in touch with nature and light and grounding, you know? So we've totally screwed that thing up. I mean, some people live in a place where they never get their feet on the dirt.

Yeah.

I try to go out every day and get my feet in the dirt and go walk. We were just out in Utah, like walking through all of the great forests, hiking. Like, how do you get out in nature more? I actually just saw a study, James, where they were looking at mental health and exercise, and they saw an increase in mental health just by having people walk and look at nature videos. I'm like, why don't we just put 'em outside?

Yeah.

Like, let's just get 'em outside. So that's one piece. And then of course, the crazy toxins that we are getting hit with that are so far from anything our body was ever built to handle. So I think those 2 things have to be overcome. And then we can kind of go back and go, all right, what would these principles have been? And, you know, there's so many simple things that you can take from that of just eating as close to nature as possible, of feast and famine. Like, you look at it and go, very unlikely we would've had regular meals every single day. And, you know, all that stuff. Which is why when people go, you can only eat this much protein. I'm like, I'm pretty sure when they killed an animal, they ate as much as they could get in them. Yeah. And that their body knew what to do with it. And the recent protein study showed exactly that. So how do we really get the toxin piece of things and the circadian rhythm piece of things fixed? Because I think those, along with just the isolation of our modern world, are our 3 biggest threats.

How are you fixing them in your own life? Like, are you being consistent about waking up at a certain time, you know, getting that early morning light? How are you doing it?

We change time zones a lot, which is not great.

Yes.

And what I found is that creatine saves me on time zone shifting, but I use lights as well. Caffeine, creatine. I'm playing around with some exogenous ketones right now with Kinetics. And then light is what I use. So I'm a big person. And it's interesting because my husband's kind of a vampire, kind of a mole. He does not like bright light. So in the morning, I'm like, I want to go outside. I want the windows open. I want to see light. You know, it's like, let's go. And I just have made a point. I've really learned how to time zone adjust well and use the light as my friend, creatine, and melatonin. So I use all of those things. And the toxin side of things, I am a huge sauna fan. I just was hearing something Dr. Rhonda Patrick was reporting on about hot baths too, being, you know, just or maybe more efficacious. The study didn't compare apples to oranges, so it was a hard study to really pay attention to. But When I'm home, I sauna every single day. And when I'm on the road, if I can get a bathtub, 'cause hotels now seem to have gotten rid of their bathtubs, but when I can get one, I do that so that I can just continue detoxifying that way too. I think that we have to think about every single day, what are the things we can do to help our body eliminate toxins? 'Cause no matter what kind of lifestyle you're created, obviously you don't wanna do silly things like drink outta plastic bottles, but still, we're gonna get toxins everywhere. It's impossible.

Yeah. I want to talk about creatine, but before we do, because we're kind of bringing up the whole science piece, how are you navigating the science? Because, you know, we've both been in this health field for long enough to see that it's, it's very co-opted at times, right? It's manipulated to whoever's paying for its desired outcome. So how are you navigating that?

Well, because we all have biases, right? I mean, everybody does. You know, the protein one is the craziest one. Like the protein wars, the wars between If you eat too much, it's going to hurt your longevity. If you don't eat enough, it's going to hurt your longevity. And then if you eat plants, it's going to be better. But if you eat animal, it's better. It's like, oh my gosh. I think that we've got to go to a couple different things. You've always got to go back to biochemistry, physiology, biology. Like, you got to go back to the science. I know they all want the double-blind placebo-controlled random blah, blah, blah, but those are really hard to do in certain cases. Like, it's really hard to do. Placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blinded exercise studies. How would you possibly do one? They know what they're doing. You know, I mean, it's like, there's some things you can do, but it's pretty darn hard. You know, I think we have to look at all these things and try to use our rational minds, the science that we already know in terms of our physiology and biology and biochemistry, and then, you know, look at these studies and then look in the real world. I remember in school, we would be taught stuff in grad school, and I go, yeah, that's fine, but I'm in real world and I, that's not working. You know, that might work in this controlled setting here, but in the free living setting, this goes out the window. So that's the other piece too, is will it work?

Yeah. It's like almost following your own emotional intelligence around something. I remember like back in the day, a girlfriend I had, she wasn't needing the pill at the time, but she was told to take the pill because that would be more natural for her than not taking the pill. And I just thought that was—

Huh?

Yeah, exactly. Like our own emotional intelligence, like that makes zero sense. I think you have to factor that in. I think that's a really good point. But let's now go to creatine. First of all, what is creatine for those that don't know, and why is it such a hot topic right now?

Creatine is a compound in your body that your body generally has about 120 to 140 grams of. It makes about a gram a day from arginine, methionine, and glycine. And then ideally you're getting another gram a day. And if you are under any kind of stress, training hard, have any kind of neuro issues, neurodegeneration, you want to go up from there. The research, the big argument in the field on creatine. So creatine comes from meat. In order to get that other gram a day would take about a pound of raw or rare meat or fish. Or 2 pounds of cooked. Now, for a carnivore, no problem. They got it. But for a lot of women, especially women who are trying to be more plant-based, right? They're not getting it. They're not going to get it. Especially when you look at the average protein intake for a woman in the US, I think it's about 80 grams, but a lot of that comes from plant. So they're not getting what they need for creatine. This is especially problematic because women have less tissue stores than men because it's stored in your muscle. So we don't have as much muscle, we don't have as much tissue store. It's like 20 to 30% less. What the current research— in fact, it's hot off the press, a new menopause study just came out showing what it did for brain fog. Here's the argument: creatine monohydrate is the most studied form of creatine, so that's the one we should take. That is like saying rotary phones are the phone that we grew up with, that's the one we should use. You know, it's like, it's this nonsensical thing. Don't we evolve and get better as we're learning things? It turns out That, you know, if you think of the math, we're supposed to take 3 to 5 grams of creatine monohydrate, and we do it based on weight. And now they're having people take 10 grams or 20 grams, depending on trying to push more into the brain, because your brain takes about 5% of your creatine uptake. The rest is your body. And preferentially, it seems your body will take more of it if it's needing it. So in order to get it to the brain, you have to push harder. So if you need 5 grams of creatine, Or 1 gram of creatine rather. Why do you need to take 5? You need to take 5 because only about 15% of creatine monohydrate gets absorbed. Now, the study I've been citing, but I can't show you the publication yet, but apparently it's 2 weeks away now, showed that 76% of people who took creatine monohydrate experienced some kind of like bloaty GI issues. And you'll see this fighting back and forth. No, no one has that. Yes, a lot of people have it. Here's what I just found from personal experience. I learned about creatine. I'm like, this is the greatest thing ever. Every woman should be on this. You know, why did I ignore this for so many years? All the guys were on it when I was down at Gold's Gym. I thought they all looked scary. And so I wanted no part of it. As I'm going through it, I go, boy, was my head in the sand. So creatine helps you create more ATP. So it's going to help you create more energy in your brain, in your body. It's good for your skin. It's good for your bones. I mean, like all sorts of stuff. Research coming out helps showing that it could help with bone. That's still iffy, but a lot of the menopausal symptoms helps you work out harder, helps you recover better. I start selling creatine monohydrate. I get more blowback on that product than I've ever got. I've been 30 years in the supplement industry, mainly helping doctors put supplements in their practices. If there's a complaint, I hear it. I've never gotten pushback like I've gotten from people. Even some of my friends and friends in the field were like, I'm not taking it. I gained weight. I don't feel good. And I'm like, uh-oh. Even my husband. So I'm like, okay. And I got some GI stuff when I was loading it, but I was like, yeah, okay, I'll work through it. You can't tell a woman to work through weight gain. They won't do it. You do hope that most of that is intramuscular, but in this situation, it's not. And that was the issue. So I was at a conference talking about creatine and this formulator came up to me and goes, I have a better creatine. And I was like, yeah, I've heard about the other creatines. It's marketing hype, blah, blah, blah. But, but show me what you got. I'm always— I want to be critically open-minded. I don't want to sound like another one of these people parroting, this is the only one you can use. I go to his manufacturing plant in the United States, in Nebraska, and we learn all about it. Tim and I test it. I'm now taking way higher doses than before, like with no GI issues because I was cranking up my other one, but it was like, eh. So And I looked at that and went, this is how I can solve this problem for women. And that's where Tim came up with the name Sheatine. It's not like—

It's a great name.

Yeah, it's a great name. It's not like guys can't take the product. It's just like, I need women to stop being afraid of it. So, I took creatine HCL, which is 85% absorbed, as opposed to 15% absorbed. And I put it together with taurine and magnesium. 'Cause when I was looking through the literature, I couldn't find a taurine-magnesium-creatine combo, but I found creatine and taurine, and creatine and magnesium. And both of them had an exponential effect. They both helped in working out harder, recovery, better recovery. So I'm like, these are 2 nutrients that people tend to be deficient in. And I created a formula that you could take 4x the foundational dose and be still right in range. So if someone wanted to load it for their brain, and then I started moving this, this product has exploded compared to anything I've ever done. You know, it just has exploded because people feel it. They feel it in their brain. They feel it in their body. It's— I use it for jet lag shifting. It's really super duper exciting. And this research project that just came out where they looked at, they looked at creatine HCL for brain fog. And they did 4 groups. It was a randomized placebo-controlled blinded study, the highest quality study that there is. And what they did was they took a group and they gave them 750 milligrams of creatine HCL, which equals about 5 grams of monohydrate. They gave one group 1,500, and then they gave one group a combined of HCl and ethyl ester, and then they gave one group nothing, placebo. And what they found was both with 750 and 1,500, they were getting the brain effects that you usually only see at higher doses of monohydrate, like 10 grams and 20 grams, which are causing some of those GI issues. So That is my creatine story. When I have this other study, I'm going to be blabbing it everywhere.

I'm curious though, what is your opinion on at what cost? Like, because clearly we're talking about things that are isolates, they're not always natural. Is your opinion that if it works, it works and it doesn't matter, or where's the balance for you?

So here's the thing, you can't do A natural creatine product. It would cost a gazillion dollars. So would your best thing be, in a perfect world, this is kind of how I set my hierarchy of things. Perfect world, get everything possibly you can from your food. Food first, always. Can you get enough vitamin D3 and K2, not K1, but K2 from your food? I doubt it. I've only seen one person that doesn't need to take D3, K2. in years of looking at labs, one that can get to the levels they need to be, and they're out in the sun all the time, and genetically they probably are blessed. I don't make vitamin D well. Magnesium, you know, if you can get enough, do an RBC magnesium, great. I rarely see someone getting enough magnesium. And omega-3s, I think that's one that if you really focus on fish and clean fish, great. But there's a lot of dirty fish out there, you know.

Mm-hmm.

And so, That's where I look at it and I go, what are the things that we should be getting in nature? Like, look back 500,000 years ago, we probably had great creatine levels in our body that we are not getting now. And if we can't get them, I wouldn't bother with creatine for a carnivore. But I don't know many female carnivores. And I also don't believe that the carnivore diet long-term is— I think it's a great elimination diet and a great healing diet. And then I think let's bring back in some Polyphenols and fiber from plants. And I know that probably upsets all the carnivores who think plants are the scariest.

Yeah, that is an interesting point though. It's like, so you've been in the industry long enough as well to just know, hey, these trends come and go. There's always someone trying to push an extreme for their brand, right? Because that's how you kind of stand out from the crowd is by picking, you know, something extreme or specific. Where have you found That, oh no, this is the truth. Like, I mean, I guess you kind of just shared it, the real food in it, but is there something out there that like you think people should almost unlearn because of all the chatter out there right now?

If we're talking food specifically, I see diets as tools and it's really about choosing the right tool for the job. What is going on right now? Quite often the diet that's gonna heal you is not gonna sustain you for the long haul. So everything needs to be designed based on you. I mean, we're in a really fun, interesting time. where we can now have labs and we can look at body composition and we can look at your lifestyle and your preferences. I mean, you could design a fabulous diet for me rich in kimchi and I'll never eat it. You know, like fermented foods, unless we're talking about wine, don't like them. Wine and chocolate are my fermented foods I like. Maybe some Greek yogurt. We've got to design diets that people will actually stick to for the long haul. I can tell you because I've written a bunch of diet books and everyone wants you to take an absolute, this is the thing. There's never a thing. There might be a thing right now and where you are in your life. For some people. And for some people, I've put some clients on a carnivore diet because it was the perfect thing to get them to start to heal and get rid of their binge behavior. 'Cause it's really hard to binge on steak. You just get full, you know? So I got someone with a lot of trigger foods and food sensitivities. I'm like, let's just, we'll just move on over to here for a little bit and get you over that.

You were the one that really enlightened me on like, even with Pluck, with the organ meats, you're like, look, it's not a gateway to organ meats 'cause I don't wanna eat organ meats.

Yeah. I just I do not eat organ meats. You know, it's like I told you, I have eaten organ meats once and it wasn't— I wasn't supposed to eat organ meats. I was in London and someone gave me a steak and kidney pie bite. It was supposed to be the steak. It was the kidney. It was such a traumatic experience that I will never touch any of that again. But this pluck stuff, and literally, I'll tell you, James, when we first got it, I'm like, yeah, that's disgusting. And then Tim makes this killer chicken fries in the Wonder Oven air fryer. That's a nontoxic air fryer. And I'm obsessed with them. And I was like, what do you do? He goes, I use Pluck.

I wanna talk about just the fact that so many people, kind of going back to so many people feel overwhelmed, but I think there's also a lot of like anxiety that's coming from people of like, I gotta do it right. Or there's this person talking that. What kind of things out there can you kind of dispel? Or, you know, even if it's 1 to 2 that you think like, just Just don't even listen. Don't even go there because it's just going to cause anxiety and it's wrong.

I love the fact that Bryan Johnson is spending so much money and open sourcing everything he's doing only to come to the conclusion that diet, exercise, relationships, and sleep make the biggest difference. Like, duh, you know? And that there's a gal who is basically the sane side of all of this movement, who's like, it's not consistent. I exercise, I do— she's got like, it's the best like slow ager out there. And I think it's 'cause she's not making it her job. Could you imagine like your whole life being what time you go to sleep and getting your perfect sleep score? And I literally had a friend who like didn't wanna go do something to mess up their sleep score. I go, isn't the whole point to make yourself resilient? So if you go out to a restaurant and they happen to get some seed oils in your food, you don't just dissolve. And I know we're all in different places in our healing journey. And sometimes when you've had like big mold exposure or something, you've got to be really careful for a while. But our goal would, to me, is so that occasionally I could stay out late with friends and it's not going to take me out. And I might have some amazing wine, it's not going to take me out. And, you know, it's like all the things you want to be able to do. Or conversely, you know, go to Park City and go do a really hard hike in altitude with people who live there and be able to pull that off too, you know, and stay right up with them.

Yeah.

So, I feel like we are majoring in the minors, and then everyone online is arguing about the minors. And I know the majors aren't sexy, but boy, if all we did was get people to eat clean quality protein, have great, you know, non-starchy vegetables and some fruit that are organic and clean and everything else. Most of the healthy fat you probably get out of your protein anyway, so you really wouldn't need to worry much about it. olive oil with cooking, got you to move every single day, do something, some of that being resistance training, some being some, you know, HIIT for lactate, just some moving every day, hopefully outside and hopefully with friends so you have a relationship and get your butt to sleep and make sleep a priority. I mean, 90% of health problems would probably go away. And yet we're worried about which red lights. And hey, I love sauna and red light and all that stuff, but do the big things first. I just did a talk for a group and the woman wanted to know all the things she could buy. And I'm like, well, are you like eating your vegetables? Like, are you getting your walking, NEAT in? Are you like, you know, the PEMF mat, much as I love them, is not going to be more important than those things. Let's make a hierarchy.

We really want to focus on the basics. And if there is someone that's like, okay, I've done that. What are the kind of tools— you've mentioned a few in the episode, but what are the specific tools that maybe your top 3 that you would be like, you know, if you're ready for tech or these tools, like these are the 3 you should get? I get asked this, by the way, we're cooking, you know, like what 3 cooking things should you have in your kitchen? And it's like, I want to hear what you would have in your household, for example.

Well, sauna for sure.

Infrared or like Swedish or, you know?

So we have a We have a fast heat Relax Sauna that goes to 180, and we have a Sunlighten infrared. What we're actually gonna do is get a SaunaSpace light and rig it into the Sunlighten to take that thing up to 180 so we can have the best of both worlds. I spend most of my time in the Sunlighten. Tim goes back and forth. The next thing is red lights. Now I am getting infrared in the red lights near and far, but I also have a great red light panel. I have a Joovv one, I have a Sunlighten one, and I'm a big red light fan. I'm using it for my eyes to help not get macular degeneration. I have a great— I don't know if you know Dr. Ronnie Bonnick from Mindshare, but she's a menopause-focused eye specialist in New York City. So doing her protocol for that. Skin for collagen, for healing, helps reduce inflammation, helps with muscle recovery. So I've been using a lot on— I have a And then the third thing, I'm kind of obsessed with peptides. So I've been using a couple different peptides. I have been playing around with different types of GLP-1s. I started playing around with them for my son for his traumatic brain injury, and he had some neurodegeneration that has turned it around, which is pretty flipping amazing. And then we started playing around with it for Tim and I, me mainly for my inflammation and osteoarthritis and autoimmune And stuff, and TIM-4 is ApoB. So we've been seeing some results there, but we're low dosing it. I'm still playing around with which one. I, next up is retatrutide. I always say retra-tu-tri, I'm not sure how to say it. Retatrutide, I think. But I've been using tirzepatide. I use BPC-157 and TB, is it TB4 or TB5000? One or the other.

Yeah, it's one or the other. Yeah, I started just using that too.

Yeah. So I use those. My son is using those as well. He's working with this amazing brain guy, Spencer Zimmerman, who's helping him with all that. And then I also started this stuff called Pentosan Polysulfate that I learned about from Dr. Elizabeth Yerth that is used in vet medicine and used in Australia to basically kind of get people— 80% of the time, you'll— all your OA symptoms will basically get better and you improve your joint space. So I'm doing that. And just started playing around with tesamorelin to see if it'll help my deep sleep. Genetically, I'm not a good deep sleeper, so I'm always looking for an edge there. So those are the things that I've been playing around with. I can totally notice a difference when I don't take BPC and TB4, like I'm in more pain the next day. So that's a definite—

Indicator that it's working.

Yeah, it's definitely working.

And then I take hormones, of course, but I've been taking hormones Do you think every woman at a certain age should start looking at hormones?

I think every woman has the right to make that decision. And I am glad that they're going to take some of those warning labels off of hormones. I was fortunate when all of this started to shift for me that all my friends were hormone docs way ahead of the curve, like back in, you know, back literally 15 years ago. So I've been on hormones since things— the first drop I went on. And that's to me when you should start to look at it, when you first start to feel things shift. Ideally, the better your lifestyle is, the better your diet is, the better your exercise is, the better your sleep is, stress management, the more you can prolong it and the less you'll need. But I think, you know, as soon as you start to need them, don't delay. No need to suffer.

Yeah. And I said women, but truth is men, men can very much use it as well.

Oh yeah. Tim's on testosterone and a teeny bit of T3 thyroid. And his testosterone was down at 300. We've done some other things too alongside of testosterone therapy to get him so he didn't need as much of the hormone. But, you know, it's like men with low testosterone, that's— it's not the same as women because they don't cycle. So there's different stuff. But I mean, they'll have all the same things, mild depression, can't build muscle, you know, become insulin resistant, get inflamed.

It seems like it's almost becoming necessary to look. It sounds to me based on this conversation and how I know you, that you really do emphasize, hey, get tested. Don't just self-diagnose. Correct?

What I think is most important is to work with a practitioner who understands this. It's crazy to me. And I've heard it from enough of my friends now is that, you know, menopause wasn't a thing for most of the OB-GYNs in school. So You know, to get trained on hormone optimization. I think I like the idea of hormone optimization rather than hormone replacement. So to find somebody who's been trained, and fortunately in our community, we have a lot of people who are amazing with this. And then to look, because one of the challenges with lab tests with women, it's very different with men, right? But with women, when you're going through perimenopause, they're all over the place. So you're getting the snapshot. You know, it's important to look, but also to look at how your body's handling the hormones when you start to optimize them to see if you're creating any kind of metabolite issues. So a lot of stuff that can be looked at there, how well you detoxify as well. And that's where you really want to work with someone who this is what they do.

2 kind of questions before we close too. One has to do with the community, but before we go there, I just want to, you mentioned your son's situation and we don't need to go into, because you've covered it a lot. So if anyone wants to know, he had a car accident, I wanna more talk about how it affected you, 'cause it seems like a really defining moment in your life. So how did that experience rewire your identity and mission?

You know, it's so funny, everyone looks at that and goes, okay, how did that change you? And I go, it didn't.

Really?

It didn't change me. It just turned the volume up. I believe that we are never better than when we're challenged. And that literally Wayne Dyer talks about like when you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. I believe that when we're squeezed, it's when really our truth shows up, who we are shows up. I remember I had someone who was working with me who was going through a really tough time, and he just behaved badly. He did things out of integrity. It was just awful. And I'm like, what's up? And he goes, oh, it's just 'cause of this. I go, no, it's just revealing who you are.

Hmm.

It is not how you show up when things are good that shows who you are. It's how you show up when things suck. That show who you are. And what was interesting is my ex-husband and I are the perfect team for my son Grant because it turned the volume up on both of us. My ex is the most patient, caring, kind person on the planet. He notices every detail, everything. He's a fact finder. I am about the opposite of that. I am not— I wouldn't say I'm not kind, but I'm not patient. And I'm gonna make sure, like, what's going on here? Are we getting into action? What's happened? So we are a good combo during all of this. The biggest thing that for me was I'd been trained in my 30s. I had an amazing mentor who taught me that the only limitations are the limitations in your mind, that you really, you control your destiny. Like, your perception creates your reality. So from the beginning of the time when we heard about the accident, it was, how do we get him to be 110%? And getting the doctors who are with us, engaged in that mission. And if they weren't, we got new doctors, 'cause we knew if they could not hold that vision, that they wouldn't be able to get us to where we wanted to be.

I feel like in this time I've known of you and known you, something shifted. Like, we had a conversation not too long ago where I was like, you know, I love how you're supporting the industry, you're supporting people and helping to lift them up. And, and very much, you are our leader. You're, so you're representing leadership, female power. But something that's so fascinating is that you're also still a learner. Like, you're still going and trying to, to kind of open up, be more vulnerable. And it's like, you're not just like, oh, I've reached this echelon, I'm good. You're like continuing to expand and grow yourself, which is not always the case with people that are in leadership positions. Has that always been the case for you?

Someone who is in a leadership position who is not doing that will not be in a leadership position for long unless they are like a dictator, and then they'll get overthrown. Truly, if you're an amazing leader, you must always lead by example. I don't know how to be a leader if I'm not in it as well. So it's what's always worked for me is I am more excited in the consumer world of things than I've ever been. There's so much amazing research and tools and stuff coming out. And then in the professional side, same thing. You look at what's starting to unfold. It could be a time where practitioners are scared because of AI, or it could be a time where they realize this is my moment to really double down on who I am, what I stand for, my personal brand, because that's going to be the differentiator when AI is doing a lot of the diagnosing for me. I'm gonna become now the coach, the artist, and the brand. So I think it's a super cool time. I keep pushing my envelope of comfort zone stuff, but that was my initial mentor was like, no growth in your comfort zone. So always looking for things that push me out of that. And that's been everything from like, you crazy sports decisions to total plant medicine retreats and everything in between. So I'm pretty much open to all of those things and looking for always what's going to help me get to the next, the next place.

I just want to reflect too. I mean, 'cause we didn't even go too deep into the community you've been building for years now. We are supporting health practitioners, you're supporting business owners, you're supporting men and women to expand their message, to support them in helping more people, whether it's through business, Through their own processes, their own individual processes, and really how to do it, like tried and true practices through your— well, I always think of it as the Mindshare Summit.

The event's gonna stay the Mindshare Summit. We decided to not change it because it really is a sharing of the minds. The whole group moved to being the Health Business Growth Collective, 'cause the reality is we, that's what we do. We help people grow and scale their health businesses. So we wanna make it obvious, but then And when you're at that level, you come to the summit because you are at a point where you can really collaborate, share best practices, network, all of that.

Yeah. And collaboration though is a keyword. I think you're an extremely powerful model of that, of like that you are not just out for yourself. You are here to collaborate. Who do you serve? I know that's one of the questions that you have everyone answer in the collective, But I've never heard who you serve.

So I have 2 audiences that I really love. One of them on the consumer side is, again, that woman who has been lied to by her bathroom scale for years and beaten herself up and can make such a shift by simply moving into looking at body composition, improving fat-free mass first, and doing that by eating protein first, you know, starting resistance training, making sure you've got good recovery, but putting yourself And then on the business side is really that health business owner that is doing something. They're a rebel. They have stepped outside of the system. If you look at what's happened in big healthcare now and big insurance and big pharma, more and more doctors are just getting pulled into the system where they can't practice the way that they know to be true. And what we found is that this works until someone in their family gets sick or they get sick. And all of a sudden, they don't have the tools, and they realize what they're doing, you know, won't work.

Right.

And they start looking outside. And once they do, and they find things outside, they go, oh, I can never unsee this, but now I need a way to practice in this way. And so, I am dedicated to showing those people how to do whether— whatever it is. Like, what you're doing is rebellious, you know? Organ meats as seasonings? Come on. So, whatever those things are, helping them create a business that's a legacy. Because for me, the selfish piece of that is early on when I was starting out, I thought, gosh, I want to help a million people get healthy. And then I was on Dr. Phil for 2 years, like pretty much every week. And I was like, well, I knew what his audience reach was. I think it was like 30 million at the time. So I'm like, cool. I was like, all right, how do you help a billion? You help a billion by helping others do the same. And I think, you know, if we help 10,000, we'll get get way past a billion because we're at like $400 million now and we probably helped, we probably helped 5,000, 4,000. So, you know, we'll see. We'll see how many it's really going to take to get there, but I'm thinking 10,000 will get us there.

Yeah. Well, I know it's affected Margaret and myself, so I just honor you for all that work you're doing and how much you are. I said earlier, like a go-giver and a go-getter, like you're moving the needle, but you're also giving back in ways that I don't, I don't see everyone doing. So I just, yeah, I wanna honor you for that. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really, I hope everyone watching or listening has been able to take something away, 'cause I, for me, it's, there's been so much gold. So thank you, JJ.

Thank you.

By the way, I don't know if I've ever asked or looked this up, but what does the J in the J stand for? Do you ever reveal that?

It's not that exciting.

It's not?

I, when I was at UCLA, I went and taught aerobics in Japan. And I got off the plane and it said, there was a sign that literally said, welcome, W-E-R-C-O-M-E, Jurisan, J-U-R-I-S-A-N. Welcome, Jurisan. My name then was Julie Johnson. They couldn't pronounce it. I became JJ when I lived in Japan because that was easier to pronounce. It sounds better, JJ, but you know, there you go. So I came home from that time in Japan, JJ, and I never changed it.

I love it. I was a JJ too, after, just after college for a little bit. So yeah, that's cool. Well, thank you again. Take care. And thank you all for joining us. Let us know what you think. Leave a review, leave a comment, but we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.