In this instructional video, JJ Virgin explains why preserving and building skeletal muscle is essential for longevity, especially after age 30 when muscle loss accelerates due to anabolic resistance. She outlines the physiological basis of muscle protein turnover, emphasizing that adequate protein—particularly the branched‑chain amino acid leucine (2.5–3 g per meal)—combined with progressive resistance training is required to stimulate muscle protein synthesis. JJ provides a practical protein target of roughly 1 g per pound of target body weight and introduces her free protein calculator and 7‑day challenge. She then details five animal‑based foods that deliver high-quality protein, leucine, and additional muscle‑supporting nutrients: grass‑fed, grass‑finished beef (rich in leucine, creatine, CLA), wild fish (omega‑3s, vitamin D, creatine, high leucine), pasture‑raised chicken (lean, high leucine), whey protein/Greek yogurt (fast‑digesting, leucine‑rich), and pastured eggs (complete essential amino acids, choline). For each, she gives serving sizes, protein and leucine content, and recommends reputable sources (ButcherBox, Vital Choice). JJ also advises supplementation with creatine, vitamin D3/K1/K2 (testing 25‑hydroxy levels, aiming 50–80 ng/mL), and fish oil (2 g EPA/DHA daily). She addresses carbohydrate intake, suggesting a baseline of ~100 g carbs per day, increasing with workout volume, to fuel glycogen stores and leverage insulin’s anabolic effects on amino‑acid uptake. Finally, she stresses that food alone isn’t enough—regular progressive resistance training is mandatory—and points viewers to a follow‑up resistance‑training video and a free home‑gym download.
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My friend, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, calls skeletal muscle the organ of longevity, and she is spot on. Building and supporting skeletal muscle is the key to aging powerfully and being able to continue to do all the things you love to do. But here's the deal. If you aren't actively using it, you're losing it. So starting right now is the time to focus on growing muscle, which is not you, right? So starting around the age of 30, we start to lose up to 1% of our muscle mass a year, but it gets even worse for strength. We lose anywhere from 2 to 4% of of our strength and 6 to 8% of our power. Now, one of the reasons this starts to happen is as we age, especially if we're not actively working out, we start to suffer from something called anabolic resistance. This is when your muscles don't respond as well to exercise and protein as they used to. So the bottom line here is you gotta work a bit harder to build and maintain muscle as you age, but it's totally worth it because otherwise you could end up like those stats I talked about. And frailty or sarcopenia is a huge risk factor for all-cause mortality. So this is not gonna happen to you. Now let's talk about how you're gonna build muscle and specifically the foods that can help you the most. So when you're younger, your hormones help you out a bit, right? They help you build some muscle. But when you start to move into those 30s, you heard the stats and beyond, this isn't the case anymore. Now it's protein that's gonna be that trigger and specifically the branched-chain amino acid leucine. Dr. Donald Layman, who's a renowned protein researcher, discovered that 2.5 to 3 grams of leucine acts as a trigger that basically turns on a process called muscle protein synthesis. So every day your muscle's going through muscle protein turnover. Basically, it's breaking down and building up. Now, if you're breaking down more than you are going through muscle protein synthesis, you're losing muscle. You're catabolic. You wanna make sure you're building up more than you're breaking down, right? And how do you do that? Leucine and resistance training. You're going to need both of those. So good dietary protein with the right amounts of leucine plus Resistance training equals stimulating muscle growth. And remember, you gotta have the resistance training. I know we're gonna be talking food, but you can't just eat the right food and sit on the couch and build muscle. Regular resistance training is mission critical to stimulate muscle growth. It's going to complement your protein intake because it creates a demand for amino acids to repair and build muscle tissue. Now, in order to build muscle, you gotta do more than what your body's used to. You gotta stress the body beyond what it's used to. Remember, it's progressive, so the body has to adapt, and you need to have the right fuel to provide the muscles with those building blocks that it needs then to repair and rebuild. So first, before we get into those specific foods, let's talk about how much protein that really is. Now, I created a free protein calculator at jjvirgin.com/7day, so 7-day, and you'll also get a free 7-day challenge so you can see how easy it is to up your protein intake. And I always tell people, eat protein first. That way you make sure you get in what you need. How much protein you need is going to vary based on your activity, your age, your weight, your goals, et cetera. But basically, I like to shoot for about a gram per pound of target body weight. Here's the deal though. All protein is not created equal because of the balance of something called essential amino acids. These 9 different amino acids and these amino acids vary based on the type of source. Plant sources tend to be low in some of these, like methionine. And that means if you're eating more of a plant-based diet, you're going to need more protein overall to get the right amounts of all the essential amino acids. And remember, we don't have a storage department for our amino acids. We can store carbs in our muscles as glycogen. We can store fat. I don't even have to explain that. But as far as storage of amino acids, we then take them from your muscles, and we don't want that. So you need to be eating those amino acids from— by getting protein all throughout the day in your 2 to 4 meals a day. So as you can tell, what you eat is mission critical for growing muscle. So here are my top, some of my top foods to incorporate into your training diet. And the first one is probably my favorite at all. In fact, if I was going to get stranded on a desert island, I would want to have my coffee and I'd want to have my grass-fed and grass-finished beef. And I say grass-fed and grass-finished because all beef is grass-fed. It's the grass finish that makes the difference, right? So we gotta make sure that you're getting both grass-fed, grass-finished. Now, when you are eating grass-fed, grass-finished beef, it's gonna be lower in fat than regular beef is, although I still say go for the leaner cuts. What's in this grass-fed, grass-finished beef that makes it so fantastic for building muscle? Well, besides getting the perfect balance of essential amino acids and a rich hit of leucine, you're also getting creatine, which I believe that Everyone should be supplementing with creatine. How's that for a bold statement? Um, especially women 30+. And it's also got CLA. Now creatine is super important for energy production of the cells, and it can also enhance your energy capacity of your muscles during HIIT training and resistance training. It helps you do those hard workouts. It can help you recover better, and you get about 0.3 to 0.4 grams of creatine in 4-ounce serving of beef. Now, I still want you to supplement creatine. That's not enough, but every little bit counts. The other thing you're getting in grass-fed, grass-finished beef is CLA. That's conjugated linoleic acid, which has been shown in some studies to promote lean muscle mass and help reduce body fat, and especially around the waist. So what should you be eating? I personally, of course, I get mine all from ButcherBox. I look for grass-fed, grass-finished. I love to do grass-fed burger patties for lunch, super easy, and then either a filet or New York for steak steak for dinner. Again, I'm going for leaner cuts. Now, 4 ounces of a lean cut like New York steak gives you 37 grams of protein, 3 grams of leucine. So you see how easy it is to hit your goals when you're reaching out for this. Next one, wild fish. And again, just like I just said, grass-fed, grass-finished. We want to be looking for wild fish. There might be some farmed out there, that's okay, but it's a wild card, right? So Wild fish, I get mine from Vital Choice. Now when you're eating fish, you're going to get the omega-3s right from the fat. You are going to get vitamin D. You're going to get creatine. By the way, fish, especially salmon, um, fish also has creatine. So salmon also has a really nice, uh, higher level of leucine compared to some of the other fish out there. And you're going to get a great balance of essential fatty acids. So Really, when I think about fish, I think about EPA and DHA, and there's a lot of buzz right now about EPA and DHA potentially supporting muscle growth. We know it reduces inflammation. I kind of think of, of omega-3s as nature's anti-inflammatory, can help support with bone remodeling and joint health, and of course it can also help reduce muscle soreness. And again, early research now, mainly animal research, is showing that fish oil could be anabolic. So don't really see a downside here. I also don't think you're going to get enough likely from just eating fish. And so eat fish 2 to 3 times a week, and I supplement with 2 grams of fish oil every day. The other thing that you're going to get in fish is vitamin D, and we know that vitamin D can help stimulate muscle protein synthesis. And when you have optimal levels of this, it's also associated with improved muscle strength. It can help with muscle contraction and relaxation, and can also help with maintaining muscle mass as you age. It's also mission critical, of course, for bone health. Now, I also think you should supplement here. I'm a big fan of supplementing with vitamin D3 and K1 and K2. Here's the thing, you are going to want to test your vitamin D levels, a 25-hydroxy vitamin D, and you're going to optimize between 50 and 80 ng per ml. And if you live in a seasonal area, you may need to vary your vitamin D intake throughout the seasons, right? Because you're going to get some from the sun. I live in Florida, so So for me, I don't really need to vary it because it's constant. Now, next up here, how would we, how would we dose this? So what I would look at for eating fish is, again, you want to go wild. I get mine from Vital Choice. I tend to pretty much stick with salmon, halibut, and sea bass. I especially like salmon because it's got this antioxidant astaxanthin. Remember, when you're working out, you're creating some oxidative stress, so antioxidants can be super helpful there. But just 5 ounces of wild salmon give you 36 grams of protein and 2.7 grams of protein. So easy way to hit your targets there. Now next up, this is just such an easy go-to, is pasture chicken. Not so easy to find pasture chicken, but pasture chicken is the one you wanna find. That's different than just free range. This means that they're actually out eating what chickens normally eat, which is apparently anything that's around. But what we don't wanna do is have chicken that's been fed GMO corn and soy. So when you're getting chicken, go for lean and you're gonna get good leucine, good essential amino acids. This one's an easy one, low calorie, easy to do, and it's high in leucine. A 4 oz cooked chicken breast has about 1.5 to 2 grams of leucine, 35 grams of protein, and just 200 calories. So this is a really easy one. Whey protein and Greek-style yogurt can be amazing for helping build muscle. They are going to give you great leucine, they're going to give you great balance of essential amino acids, they are fast-digesting, quickly absorbed. However, again, remember you do not want to do that if you've got issues with dairy. Now, when I do this, I tend to do either— I like to rotate these in if I'm doing them. I can, I can get intolerant to dairy if I'm not careful with it, um, and I tend to go fat-free and then add in some other more controlled healthy fats. That really depends on your macros and what you're looking to do. The nice things you're also getting with dairy is some vitamin D, and some calcium. So that's also going to help support good bone health. You got to make sure you're doing pastured eggs and pastured egg whites. Now I'm including eggs and egg whites for a reason. Eggs are fantastic. They're like one of the greatest sources of getting all the 9 essential amino acids, plus you're getting choline in there. And a large egg has like 6 grams of protein in it. So that's— and again, what we know about eggs is that if you eat the egg white and the yolk, the egg white is all protein. The yolk's got some great healthy fats and it's also got rich source of choline. But if you eat it together, you better protein absorption, probably due to something going on with the bile acid that's triggered when you eat the yolk. However, you're going to eat a lot of eggs to get the amount of protein you need. So one of the ways that I do this, since the egg itself has 6 grams of protein, the egg white alone is about 3.6 grams of protein, depends on the size of the egg of course. And one egg has, depending on the size of the egg, 0.5 to 0.7 grams of leucine. Most of that's really in that egg white. What I do here is I put a combination of egg yolks and egg whites because I want the yolk because of that choline. And choline, super important, it supports healthy cell membranes. It's really important for muscle cells to function properly that they have those healthy cell membranes, right? That's how they grow, contract, and repair effectively. And it's also important for muscular contraction. Now, when you're doing exercise, muscles are going to use two different things for energy, right? They're going to use stored fat and they're going to use stored carbs. Choline can help facilitate the breakdown of fats, which of course provides energy for muscle contractions and endurance during workouts. Plus, choline plays an important role in regulating, regulating the levels of certain hormones such as growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor, IGF-1. And growth hormone are crucial for muscle protein synthesis, muscle repair, and overall muscle growth. So you want the choline, that's the bottom line. So here's how you would do it. If you took 2 eggs and you took 6 egg whites, that would get you— from the 2 eggs you'd get 12 grams of protein and a gram of leucine. From the 6 egg whites you would get another 22, um, let's see, overall you'd have about 20— I'm doing math on the run here— 22 grams of protein there. And remember You're getting about half a gram of leucine for each egg or egg white. So you're getting the leucine you need, you're getting the protein you need. So that's how I put it together is I'll do a couple eggs, more egg whites, and I'll scramble it all up together. Now, if you throw in a little bit of chicken breakfast sausage or some bacon, then you don't need as many egg whites, right? But you're just counting it up to make sure you get what you need. Now, obviously I'm focusing on protein here and specifically animal protein that's going to be rich in leucine and well-balanced in the 9 essential amino acids. But I do want to do a shout out for carbs. Because I think we tend to get really freaked out about carbs. And my rule with carbs is you don't want to fear them, you do want to earn them. You want to start with about a base of 100 grams carbs a day and then add more as you work out more. Carbohydrates, as you know, break down into glucose, and then your cells use that glucose as an energy source, right? When you work out, your body is going to take glycogen that's been stored in the muscle and use it as energy. Similarly, it can also do that with liver glycogen. So during exercise, We're going to get that glycogen out. It's going to give us that ready, fast fuel source. If you're doing hard workouts, short, high-intensity activities, resistance training, HIIT training, glycogen is what is getting you through the workout, not fat. And when you eat carbs, you're going to— your blood sugar is going to go up, right? That's going to make your insulin get released from the pancreas. This is critical. I think we've gotten really freaked out about insulin, but insulin should come up and come down, right? Because when insulin comes up, it's going to help promote muscle growth. Insulin helps facilitate the uptake of amino acids, and you remember, these are the building blocks of protein, into the muscle cells, which is going to help support muscle recovery and growth. Insulin also helps block muscle breakdown, so it's going to help preserve the muscle tissue you already have. So think of carbs as providing that quick fuel for the workouts, and the insulin response with the meals helps with amino acid uptake. Now, speaking of workouts, If you're not sure where to get started on your strength training, I've got you covered. The next video is going to walk you through my resistance training plan designed for women like you that's going to help you feel better fast and get fit as quickly as possible. It's work. It's going to take time, but, you know, I'm going to try to help shortcut as much as possible. I've got a free download that's going to help you set up your home gym and tell you exactly what you need to do during your workout.
