5 Foods I Eat To Lose Weight + Build Muscle Over 50
In this instructional video, JJ Virgin addresses the common belief that losing fat and building muscle after age 50 is impossible, and presents her personally tested list of five core protein‑forward foods (grass‑fed/grass‑finished red meat, wild salmon, plain Greek‑style yogurt, a whole‑egg plus egg‑white combo, and daily collagen/bone broth) along with two bonus items (berries and lentils). For each food she explains the specific nutrients that make it valuable for older adults—creatine, leucine, omega‑3s, astaxanthin, heme iron, casein, choline, and collagen—how these support muscle protein synthesis, joint health, brain function, gut health, and satiety. She also shares practical sourcing recommendations (e.g., ButcherBox, Vital Choice, Piedmontese), preparation ideas, and the importance of supplementing when dietary intake may fall short (e.g., her Sheatin creatine for women, bone‑broth protein powder). Throughout, she emphasizes the “eat protein first” principle, recommending 0.7‑1 g protein per pound of target body weight and offering a free 7‑day “Eat Protein First” challenge. The video concludes with a call to action to subscribe and apply the outlined food strategy for rapid improvements in energy, bloating, hunger, and cravings.
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Are you thinking that losing fat and building muscle if you're 50+ is impossible? Good news, think again. But the secret isn't just about what you eat, it's about the foods you actually prioritize. This is important. Now, after years of testing, I have narrowed it down to 5 foods that you want to make sure that you are getting into your diet on a regular basis. Are you curious? I'm going to share them now. I almost feel like I'm stepping into like I don't know, diet religions here when I start to talk about this, 'cause I'm gonna tackle the big polarizing subject right at the start, red meat. Now, you might be in the camp that red meat is bad for your health, dangerous. You might be coming from the camp of like, all you're eating is red meat. I'm gonna go right down the middle here. Now, here's the reality. You are what you eat ate. There is a huge difference from eating some processed red meat burger at one of the fast food places and eating some grass-fed, grass-finished lean cuts of beef. Let's be clear here. And what we know about the grass-fed, grass-finished is they actually have higher levels of some of these polyphenols that can be super important for longevity. They also are going to have better sources of omega-3s and CLA, so some really important fatty acids. But why do I love red meat so much? Well, first of all, it's got something called creatine. Now, if you've been watching my channel, you know I'm a bit obsessed with creatine. Turns out that we have probably 100 to 140 grams of creatine in our muscle stores, mainly in our muscle, a little bit in our brain. And we turn over some every single day. We're making some every single day. So first we're gonna make some from some amino acids, arginine, glycine, methionine. So we make some from amino acids every day, but we also need to get it in from our food every day. So we make about a gram we need to intake about a gram every single day. Where do we get that from? Biggest source, red meat. Now, reality is that you'd have to eat at least a pound of pretty rare red meat or 2 pounds of cooked red meat every day. We're probably not getting all that in, so I'm gonna emphasize also supplementing. That's why I made Sheatin, my creatine for women. But I love to always start food first. Supplements are supplements. That name is there for a reason. Food for first. So again, red meat, great source of very bioavailable protein, really good essential amino acid profile. Remember, amino acids, essential amino acids, are why we're eating protein in the first place. There's 9 essentials, 11 conditionally essentials that we can make from the 9 essentials, and the balance of them matters. When you think about eating animal protein, those essential amino acids, the balance of them, are made to rebuild animals, right? Protein is our function macro. When you eat plants, the balance of those essential amino acids is made to rebuild plants. We're not plants, we are animals. So we're gonna get the creatine stores, we're gonna get that CLA and omega-3, we're gonna get some polyphenols, but we're also gonna get a very bioavailable source of essential amino acids, and that's important too. So what am I doing to eat red meat? I'm gonna give you a couple ways that I love to consume it. Number 1, I order most of our red meat from a couple different sources. One that I love is ButcherBox, and I'm getting not just grass-fed, 'cause all red meat's grass-fed, let's be real on this. It's the finishing that matters. And so I tend to focus on grass-fed, grass-finished. Am I hardcore about this? I am not, newsflash. If I'm out to dinner and all they have is corn-fed and that's what I wanna order, I order it, because there's actually some different benefits from the corn-fed you're not getting from the grass-fed. But at home, I choose to do grass-fed, grass-finished. Newsflash: one other great thing about red meat is that it's a great source of very bioavailable iron. It's harder to get iron from plant sources, it's way easier to get it from your meat. So heme iron from meat, very bioavailable. So at home what we do is we will get grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef. Now I personally like the leanest sources of that, so a 93 7, so 7% fat. We also do New York steaks, and we also— we tend to pretty much focus on New York steaks, picanhas, and grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef. So that's what I love to do the most. I also get these little sirloin tips. I get those from something called Piedmontese, that company. And these little grass-fed sirloin tips are amazing. You can literally stick them in an air fryer or sauté them and then throw them in with some cauliflower rice pilaf, maybe throw in some lentils and chop up some broccoli and some mushrooms, and you're done. You just made a fully complete meal, easy in minutes. Next up, thing that I get in every single week, and quite often 2 or 3 times a week, is wild salmon. Now, where I was— had a little leeway there with the grass-fed, grass-finished beef, and again, why do I love beef? Rich in leucine that helps trigger muscle protein synthesis. Um, with salmon, I'm hardcore on the wild. I will not eat farmed salmon. Now, I'm sure that there are somewhere out there are some very great salmon farms, but without knowing what's going on there, what they're feeding the salmon, how close in captivity they are, if they're getting injected with anything— I don't know what I don't know. So I stick with wild salmon. Salmon are an amazing source of protein, but also there's a couple other key reasons I love salmon specifically, and the bright pink salmon specifically, like Chinook, is That color is because they're swimming up close to the surface and the sun is hitting them and they create this astaxanthin. It's this— it's to protect them from the sun, and it is an incredible antioxidant. It's also one that I take and I use in skincare products. So I love salmon because it's got great omega-3 fatty acids. We know omega-3 fatty acids are also anabolic. They can help you build and hold on to muscle, and they can help you reduce inflammation. Think of them like nature's Advil. They also help with bone remodeling. So I'm getting omega-3 fatty acids I'm getting astaxanthin. And crazy enough, fish has creatine in it. Now, if you go and have sashimi, you're going to get a lot more creatine. Creatine degrades with heat, so that's why I said when we were talking about meat, like eating it more rare or eating carpaccio. But with salmon, if you can go out and get some sashimi, bonus, because you're going to get a lot more of that creatine from it. We do salmon at home, we order it from Vital Choice. We tend to do it 2-3 times a week, but it's also one of my go-tos when I'm out I see wild salmon on the menu, this one I love to order. All right, next up, Greek-style yogurt. Now you might be surprised to hear me talk about Greek-style yogurt because in the Virgin Diet I talk about pulling out gluten, dairy, eggs, corn, soy, peanuts, sugar, and artificial sweeteners. In the Virgin Diet, I recommend pulling these things out for at least 3 weeks because we're trying to figure out which foods work for you and which foods don't. Quite often, if you have leaky gut, which can be caused by gluten by a lot of pain meds, by ultra-processed foods, by alcohol, and by stress. And the big ones are gluten, stress, alcohol, and fructose. Your gut's become more permeable than it should be. Your immune system lies just under that single layer of your gut, and foods sneak out and they hit that layer, that immune layer, and they trigger an immune response that creates inflammation, all sorts of problems. And dairy just happens to be one of those key triggers and also something that's so common in our diet. If you've healed your gut, Greek-style yogurt can be amazing for you. It's got casein, which is a very slow-digesting protein, um, calcium-rich, and super low calorie. So here's how I like to do Greek-style yogurt. I'm sure I'll get some flack for this, but I have a reason. There are some benefits to dairy fat. However, I personally prefer to get my dairy fat in the form of something like ghee, and I do non-fat plain organic Greek-style yogurt. That's what I focus on. I don't worry about grass-fed, grass-finished because that's really changing the fatty acid profile of it. You can make a good thing bad very quickly with Greek-style yogurt by getting one of those fruit on the bottom, which means you just turned your great thing into a sundae because that fruit is like fruit and sugar, or by getting one of these fruit-flavored yogurts where they generally use sugar to get it to that point, or they use artificial sweeteners. So Avoid those things. Get your own. You're gonna save money anyway. Get a big 32-ounce plain Greek-style yogurt, organic. What I do is I like to throw in either my bone broth protein, or I happen to have it right here because I travel with it, my collagen. And I'll throw in one or the other. Bone broth protein is 80% collagen. I'm trying to get some collagen in as well because that's the most abundant protein in our body, but it's not a complete essential amino acid profile. I put the two of those together. That's Such an easy thing to do. And now I've got that slow-digesting casein, added in some extra collagen, and a big protein hit. Very low calorie too. Another big shocker is probably going to be eggs, because again, in the Virgin Diet, I found that when people had leaky gut, eggs and dairy tend to be the biggest culprits. But once you've healed your leaky gut, oh my gosh, eggs to me have always been one of per— nature's perfect foods. Not in the United States so much though. I'm always blown away when I go to Europe and I order eggs and I look at the egg yolk and orange, which is in Europe, it's bright orange. And then today I was at a hotel and I had eggs for breakfast, and there's that pale yellow yolk. You are what you eat, ate. You want those yolks to be bright yellow. So in the United States, get yourself some pastured eggs. Bonus points if you live in a place where you can actually get one of the collectives, those community collectives or farmers collectives, to deliver pastured eggs to you. But key is in the color of the yolk. Now, the way that I like to do eggs is I will eat a combo of whole eggs and egg whites. I don't really love the yolks, but I really love what the yolks do for me. And what we do know is that you're actually going to absorb more protein if you do the combination. In nature, protein comes with fat. Think about every animal source of protein out there. So any animal source of protein is coming with fat. And so what I like to do is take 2 eggs and then 4 to 6 egg whites as my combination for breakfast. And then I'm getting the choline from the egg yolk, which is really important for fatty acid metabolism. It's great for your brain. So I've got that combination. How would you best prepare these? I'm going to do a shout out for a dish that's not very common, but weirdly enough, in the last 2 hotels I've been in, they've had this on the menu. And I'm like, what a bonus. And it's something called shakshuka. And shakshuka I first learned about when I was Istanbul. I was at the, you know, first morning waking up, doing my time zone adjusting. So I'm up looking at the light, I'm gonna have breakfast, and I go downstairs and they have this buffet and they have this tomato thing with little floating poached eggs in it and some feta cheese over the top, and I fell in love with it. And so that is what shashuka is, is basically poached eggs, feta cheese, and kind of a tomato stew. Super healthy. A great thing to do. And all I did this morning to pump it up a bit was have that and then add in some extra egg whites. So give that one a try. But I love the whole egg, egg white combo, especially because I want to make sure that I'm also getting in that choline. Another polarizing topic on the internet— oh my gosh, people can fight and have wars over just about anything out there. And boy, is nutrition polarizing. Collagen— should you or shouldn't you? Here's the deal with collagen: it is actually the most abundant protein in our body. Now, what you'll hear out there is it doesn't help you build muscle. True. However, wait for it. And it's not, you know, a complete profile of essential amino acids. Also true. However, I think bone broth and collagen are super important to include in our daily diet. Again, because collagen is such an abundant protein throughout our body. This is how we make our connective tissue, our hair, skin, and nails. And so when you think about it, when you're lifting weights, The first thing that happens is you start to lift weights for the first time is that your muscles and nerves need to learn how to communicate. So it's this whole central nervous system situation where you're learning just how to move things again. Next up, a couple weeks of that, your connective tissue has to strengthen up. When people say, oh, I pulled a muscle or I tore a muscle, they're not tearing the muscle in the muscle belly. Very unusual to do that. What they're doing is they're tearing the muscle where the muscle and the tendon connect, or the tendon and the bone connect, or the ligament connects to the bone. But it's usually muscle-tendon connection, and collagen is critical for this. So when I think about getting stronger, I always prioritize making sure that I'm getting collagen in every single day to support that. The other thing that collagen is important for besides hair, skin, and nails is great skin. Super important for great skin. So how do I do this? If I can, I have some bone broth. And I will say that— nope, I would love to say I make it at home. My son makes it for me at home. But a lot of times I'll be out at a restaurant, and if they have homemade bone broth, I'm having it. So homemade bone broth at a restaurant, it's one of my favorite things to do. But I don't generally do that that often. So what I make sure so that I get collagen in every single day is that I either add it into my morning smoothie I'll either do my bone broth protein powder or I'll add in collagen into what I'm doing. So either a morning smoothie, you can load it into oatmeal, you can put it into Greek-style yogurt— that's my favorite way to use it— or you can just dump it in your coffee. So I make sure that I get it in, in some form at least once a day, quite often twice a day, because of all the amazing benefits that it has. I know I said 5, but I want to give you a couple bonus points for the win. Number 1, One of the things that I eat every single day is a variety of different berries. I tend to focus on blackberries and blueberries, but I add in a couple raspberries here and there too. Why do I love berries so much? All that bright color has great fiber that feeds your gut microbiome, but it also is rich in polyphenols and antioxidants. And antioxidants are super important. We're working out hard, we're breathing a lot, and we want to neutralize those— any— those free radicals and reduce inflammation. So berries can be super important there. They're also a great carbohydrate that you can then store into your muscles to have energy for when you work out next. Alongside that, um, I really love lentils. Of all of the legumes, I think lentils are the superstar. They're higher in protein than the other ones, and they're really easy to use. Whereas with beans, you have to soak them and then you have to boil them forever, lentils are easy to throw into things. They cook quick. And they give you a great source of fiber and slow, low carbs. So it's great for getting that— those glycogen stores back up and having some great slow, steady, sustained energy. All right, you probably noticed those 5 foods were all protein sources. Why is that? A couple different things. Number 1, because protein has the essential amino acids that are going to help you start muscle protein synthesis. That's that leucine trigger, the work of Dr. Donald Layman, that Thank you, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, for letting me know about that. So you get that. You also need all of those amino acids to help you rebuild. Remember, they're function macros. They're helping you rebuild, restructure. Next thing is it's super satiating. So when you eat protein, I like to say eat protein first, it's going to help you eat less overall. It's going to help you make better food choices at your next meal. It reduces your cravings. In fact, they just did a study where they gave people a protein-rich meal and then gave them yummy things like, you know, banana pancakes with Nutella or candy. And those people who ate the protein-rich meal didn't eat or ate less of those little treats after the fact. So not only does it help you feel fuller longer, it also has a bigger thermic effect. It takes like 25% of the calories from protein to go through that digestion assimilation. Probably a lot of that is in that expensive muscle protein synthesis, that muscle protein turnover process. So these are all the reasons that protein are my top 5 foods and that I say eat protein first to make sure that you get in the amount that you need every day, which is somewhere between 0.7 and 1 gram per pound of target body weight. If you are struggling with this, by the way, I do have my Eat Protein First 7-Day Challenge. It is free, my favorite word, and you can check that out. I will make sure that I include all of that in the notes below and in the show notes. But that's a simple way to ensure that you are getting all of these in. And you will start to notice right away as you're doing the things I talk about in this video, what's going to happen for you. Well, you will feel like you're de-bloating. You're going to feel like you have more energy. You're not going to feel as hungry. You're not going to have the cravings. And that literally happens in a matter of days. So I'm going to challenge you to take this to heart and put it into your daily routine. If you loved this video, make sure that you subscribe to the channel, check out my other videos, and be sure to check the next one coming up.
