Calories Are Not The Problem, Your Hormones Are Storing Fat

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What if I told you fat loss after 40 isn't about eating less? It's about what your hormones are telling your body to do with the food you eat and listening to those hormones. Because I meet women every day who say, I barely eat, I work out all the time, and nothing works anymore. Not like it used to. And here's the truth most people never explain. Calories are information, but hormones decide what your body does with that information. Hey there, I'm JJ Virgin, nutritionist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and someone who learned this the hard way. There was that moment in Palm Springs standing by the pool where I felt so self-conscious, so bloated, and so frustrated because I'd been doing everything right. Nothing had changed and my body was just storing fat away and in different places, right around my middle. And that's when I realized my body wasn't out of discipline. It wasn't out of control. It was in storage mode. Today, I'm going to show you why cutting calories can actually make fat loss harder after 40, which hormones are really running the show, and what you can do instead so that your body starts cooperating with you instead of fighting you. Let's talk signals, shall we? Not sacrifice. Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, mom— turned 4-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. 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. 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 SubscribeToJJ.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com/brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer.

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Okay, so what is the biggest lie women have been told about why they can't lose fat after 40? What do you think it is? It is move more, eat less. It stops working at midlife. Like, we're more disciplined than ever. We know more than ever. But the reality is we've been gradually losing muscle, which drops our resting metabolic rate, and we're moving less. Which lowers our non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which is really the biggest thing we can do. Those two things to drive our metabolism. And if we start exercising a lot more and eating a lot less, we could bump up the cortisol. And by the way, if hormones have gone down, insulin resistance is probably happening, which is making us hungry. All of that means storing fat around the waist. More on that in a moment, because we're gonna talk about which hormones are most responsible for fat storage versus fat release. So what's going on? Well, estrogen's going down. It counter-regulates cortisol and insulin. So if estrogen's going down, guess what's going up? Cortisol and insulin. Now, you want cortisol to go up throughout the day. Like, wake up in the morning, you want cortisol up. You want it to then gradually go down throughout the day. If it's up all the time, that's not a good thing. It's going to raise your blood sugar, it's going to raise your hunger, and it's going to make you store more fat around your waist. This is where you have some cortisol receptors. Likewise, if you've got Lower estrogen, you got higher insulin, which is pro-inflammatory. And also when insulin's high, your fat cell doors are locked. You can't access stored fat for fuel, so you're hungry. And then since insulin's high, when you eat, it's easier to store that as fat. What the heck? Okay, so that's the first part. Then progesterone's going down, which is messing up your sleep along with the hot flashes from the estrogen. And what happens when you don't sleep well? You're more insulin resistant and you're more stressed, cortisol's going up again. You getting the picture here? And then for so many of us, the first sign of all of this is low thyroid function, which thyroid and estrogen, when those are low, hard to build muscle. Add in testosterone, the trifecta for accelerating that muscle loss. And if you don't have good thyroid function, you can't regulate your sex hormones well. Plus, we know thyroid is a big driver of your metabolism. So there you go. You look at all that and you go, you can see how your hormones can override the calorie math, you know, can make it so that your body is not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And it can also be the reason why you and a friend go on a trip together, do exactly the same things. You eat the same, you exercise the same, you sleep the same, everything the same, and somehow you're gaining weight and she's staying the same or losing. I'll never forget when I took a group of women to a retreat out in Santa Barbara. One of my clients had this amazing horse ranch. She said, "Bring a group of people, we'll do a retreat." So what was awesome about this is it was like a little science experiment for me. I didn't tell them this, but I was able to tightly control everything. I reined the kitchen, right? So I knew exactly what they were having to eat. I knew when they were going to bed, when they were waking up, how much they were sleeping, how much they were exercising. And lo and behold, over that week, some women lost a little bit of body fat. Some women stayed exactly the same and some women gained a little bit. Come on, what the heck? So obviously we gotta consider hormones when we're considering losing weight because remember, you don't lose weight to get healthy, you have to get healthy to lose weight. And that means balancing your hormones and improving your metabolic health. Super duper important because calories are information, but hormones decide what the body does with that information. So a key point of this is getting your hormones optimized so they can help you build muscle and lose fat. And I'll tell you the crazy story that happened to me, because honestly, this is not a top 10 life experiences. This is like one of those ones that I just remember, just the dread, the awfulness. So I was in Palm Springs with my then-boyfriend of, I think, like 2 years. And I still remember asking him what he wanted. You know, he was just kind of depressed that weekend. I was like, well, what is it you want in your life? You know, what's going on? And careful what you ask, right? What would you like? What do you want your life to look like? And he's listing out the things that he wants in his life. And you know what I noticed when he was listing out these things is that I was not on the list. So being the direct human that I am, I said, I noticed that I was not on this list. He goes, well, I was going to talk to you about that. I'm like, oh. And so he broke up with me. We then went to the pool because we still had this awkward, weird weekend together where we'd broken up. And so we're sitting at the pool and I not only feel rotten about that, I just got dumped, but I also feel rotten about my body because I hadn't changed anything. I wasn't doing anything different. I was doing everything right, right? I was eating healthy, I was exercising, I was sleeping well, and I was gaining weight around my midsection. In fact, I went and got a pregnancy test. I was like, I must be pregnant. I mean, what is going on? It was that weird. My energy was funky. I wasn't sleeping well. I was craving. I was like, I know what this is. Well, I was wrong. It wasn't pregnancy. It was perimenopause, right? And it was causing me to store more fat around my belly, even though I was— hadn't changed anything. My body went into storage mode. Not balance mode. And it really helped me realize— I've been saying for years, your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. Now, calories count, do not get me wrong here. You can't just go, oh, they're healthy, I'll eat as much as I want. Too much healthy food's unhealthy. But it made me realize, like, if your hormones have shifted you into a storage mode, you could be doing all these things right, and your metabolism has dropped a little bit as your estrogen's dropped, and you become more insulin resistant, and your body's like, cool, let's just store some fat. And that was what was happening to me. So I'll never forget lying on the beach chair with your legs up, 'cause then you'll look a little better, like your stomach will suck in a little bit. You've got like a book over your stomach. You're doing everything to cover everything up, right? Like book over stomach, you know, whatever you can so that you don't feel like you're just kind of the beach dwell on the pool chair. Maybe you can relate to that. Hopefully you can't. Hopefully you go, I have no idea what you're talking about, JJ. And hopefully I will prevent you from ever having to feel like that. But these are just the things. I mean, I know what happened to me and I remember being out in Palm Desert. I was a member of a club where I could take my kids because they had a good kids club, sitting in the pool, listening to women complain about perimenopause and that one of their doctors put them on birth control. One of them put on Prozac and they just feel like they're bloated. So I know it wasn't just me. And I know from hearing over and over and over again that we're struggling. And I see these patterns over and over in women over 40. They go and they're like, okay, what I'm doing isn't working. So they figure they need to do more. Okay, come on. We all know that's definition of insanity, right? So what used to work was cutting calories and doing cardio. So I must just need to cut calories more and do more cardio. First of all, not sustainable. Second of all, won't work. And what's wild too is your body, you know, if you cut calories for too long a period of time, your thyroid will downshift. We know that. But at some point you get hungry anyway. But also a high caloric restriction diet causes a lot of muscle mass loss. We're paying so much attention to that now with the GLP-1s, but the GLP-1s are not what's causing the muscle mass loss. It's the poor diet. So that's a big one. But here's the other thing. If you start to do a lot of cardio, do you know what you stop doing throughout the day? Moving as much. And this has been documented in the literature that people, when they exercise, tend to steal from their non-exercise activity thermogenesis. They move less, so they compensate, so they stay the same. That's why whenever I work through a program with someone, I always start with, we're going to keep your NEAT up. We always start there. Now, it's interesting because Weight gain, fat gain in your 40s, this looks totally different than fat gain in your 20s. In your 20s, when you gain weight, you would gain it in your butt and thighs, which nowadays everyone seems to want, but you can't preferentially decide where that fat's going, as we've always learned. When you start to become low estrogen, high cortisol, insulin resistant, the fat goes to your belly. You probably noticed it's very different hormonal fat gain because we have these receptors, hormone receptors around that area, and this This is also risky fat gain because a lot of this is something called visceral adipose tissue. In fact, one of the great ways you can kind of tell if this is an issue for you is through just a very simple, very cheap waist, hip, and height measurement, where if your waist is bigger than 0.8 compared to your hips, your waist is more than half the size of your height, you are in trouble. That is showing more visceral adipose tissue. So very important, but that's an easy way to do it. Of course, I love a DEXA, love a bioimpedance scan to really get you better metrics, but I think that's a great way to start. So we talked about like a lot of times when you overexercise and that when you do cut calories, it can cause thyroid to sort of start to go down. Excessive thyroid goes down and cortisol goes up. Now I'm not saying don't cut calories. I think that there's a progression to doing this, which we'll talk about in a moment. So stay with me. I'm gonna talk about that. But just going for this extreme caloric cutting can be very problematic. And then let's say that you are stressed, like, What happened with me when the boyfriend dumped me, that just was another nail in the stress coffin. I had a lot of stuff going on, complete with crappy divorce, son with some emotional things going on, just stuff, you know. I— we all have life, right? That means like poor sleep, elevated cortisol, higher blood sugar. And I could see it, you know, when I got my blood sugar test. I'm like, why is my blood sugar 100 when I'm eating healthy and exercising? And when you've got higher blood sugar, it will lead to higher insulin resistance. It will lead to more fat storage. And of course, we also know the cortisol leads to more fat storage around the waist. So around and around and around we go. And the bummer with all of this is the emotional toll that it takes on you because you're like, what the heck? I'm doing everything. I might as well just knock it all off, sit on the couch and eat cookies and drink champagne. I mean, it's not working anyway. For me, it would be cheesecake. But I also remember feeling that it was beyond frustration. It was just, it was moving into desperation. It was just a really horrible thing because, you know, you're looking and going, nothing's working. You know, I feel like I look at food, I gain weight. My body feels like it's like at war with me. I'm hardly eating. What on earth do I do? And I'm glad you asked because let's talk about that. Because if calories aren't the only lever, what is? And I always like to say, you know, calories count, but where they come from and when you eat them and how much of different macros matters. And if you are doing caloric restriction, there's techniques to do it, like caloric cycling, that can make a difference and not trash your thyroid. So first thing you got to think about is what is really going on here? What the heck's going on? And how do I counteract that and balance that? Now, of course, one thing I'm going to say is I don't believe women should suffer. I don't believe anyone should suffer, but especially in terms of hormones, I think it would behoove you to investigate hormone replacement therapy with someone who's trained in menopause. Wildly enough, not every OB-GYN is trained in menopause. It's bizarre. It's an actual extra education. But I would totally look for someone who's trained in menopause and investigate whether hormone replacement therapy is the right thing for you. There you go with that. Case in point, post-pool experience for me, I got on hormones. And what a change, what a difference. And so I've been on hormones since my late 40s, and you'll have to pry them. My girlfriend, Dr. Tina Moore, says, you'll have to pry my estrogen from my cold, rigid fingers. I'm like, I feel the same. So estrogen and progesterone and testosterone are dropping. It's going to be hard to build muscle. It's going to be— impact your sleep. It's going to make you more insulin resistant. You're going to be more stressed, and maybe thyroid issues are going on. If you've got thyroid issues, you got to get those fixed. Low thyroid can lead to bone mineral density issues, etc. So that's always the first thing is let's work on thyroid and cortisol first. Get those suckers stabilized. Get them stabilized. And for thyroid, likely that'll mean some type of replacement, although sometimes with Hashimoto's— and I highly recommend my girlfriend Dr. Dr. Izabella Wentz's Hashimoto's Protocol. You may be able to do with dietary shifts for an autoimmune diet, and then really paying attention to cortisol. If I could go tell my younger self one thing, there will, there'll be a lot of things, but one of the things I'd say is stress is not a badge of honor, sister. No one said you need to be Superwoman. So stress is like the key thing here. And it's not about like, you're not gonna have stress. It's about how you respond to the stress. We're all gonna have stress. The winners, the people who are successful become super stress resilient. They just can tolerate more because they train their body to be able to do it. It's one of the reasons I love doing hard things in exercise. It trains your body how to handle stress and recover. So there's that piece. And then you can do a lot with insulin sensitivity by focusing on sleep and by doing resistance training and building that muscle, because that's the first place we can start to restore that insulin sensitivity. By shifting your food to eating protein first, and then fiber comes along for the ride. Protein and fiber are like your beautiful duo for blood sugar balance. And then giving your eating at the right times, eating an hour or two after waking up, stop eating at least 2 to 4 hours before bed. I think 3 to 4 hours is kind of the sweet spot. No drip-in food. Just have breakfast, have lunch, have dinner. If you really need something in the afternoon, okay, you can have a little snack, maybe a cup of bone broth. How about that? Little bit of berries. That's that. I mentioned eat protein first because you need protein to build your hormones and your neurotransmitters. But also when you eat protein first, it is so filling that like you eat protein first, then you go into your non-starchy vegetables and your fiber. And I dare you to try to eat more than you need because you will be full. It will stabilize your blood sugar. It's more thermic, burns more calories than protein or fat. It's super satiating and satisfying. Like, no one ever has told me in 40-plus years of working in the field, JJ, I lost my mind and I pigged out on chicken or salmon or eggs. It's never happened. And when I was on that TV show TLC's Freaky Eaters, we did have people addicted to raw meat, but they weren't eating gazillions of it. They just— that's all they would eat. But the people that seemed to be eating everything were French fries, potatoes. That was like always the thing. It was always like fat or carbs. The other thing that protein helps you do, which is really important as you're starting to get into perimenopause because you're starting to produce some of the bad hormone metabolites, is protein and fiber are super mission critical for detoxification. Now, I think of muscle as a hormone regulator. For a couple of different reasons. Remember, when muscles contract, they actually release hormone-like messengers called myokines. These things can actually— while you're exercising, your cortisol might go up, but then has a compensatory drop afterwards. So it's lower. It can help boost testosterone. It helps improve insulin sensitivity. So it's really key for helping you with getting better hormone balance. But also remember, as you're going through all of this, your muscle could start to go down. So We want to do more than what we used to do, not less. You might hear, oh, take it easy, you're getting older. Knock it off. You get older because you're taking it easy. Don't do that. And then sleep is one that you really— this might send you running to get the hormone replacement therapy because it's really hard to counteract a hot flash. I mean, there is that sleep chilly pad that you can sleep on that's cooling. So that's kind of cool. So that's an option. And sleeping with the— you want the air turned down to 65 to 68 anyway, but you really got to make yourself sleep through the night. I've been using— I have a product I developed called Sleep Candy. Which is a blend of melatonin and L-theanine and 5-HTP and inositol and B6. So I take that and my magnesium body calm every single night without fail, even travel to the Amazon with it. Like, I never miss it. But during this time, you might need a little more than that. You might need to just start looking at your progesterone at night because that can make a big, big difference. Because one night, poor night's sleep, you're more insulin resistant, your cortisol will be higher. And did you know that chronic Poor sleep, not getting the 7 to 9 hours of sleep, even if you're eating well, even if you're exercising, sets you up for obesity, puts you at risk for obesity because of its impact on insulin and cortisol. So gotta sleep. Gotta sleep. Now, it's interesting, speaking— when I think of sleep, it's really— I also want you to sleep during the normal circadian rhythm. I just had Dr. Deanna Minich on Well Beyond 40, and one of her lines that I was like, this is the best line, is get your light right. It's that simple. Sleep when it's dark, eat when it's light, right? So should we eat at midnight? No, because we should be asleep because it's dark. Should we eat at 8 in the morning? Yes, it's light. So this of course doesn't work in Iceland, but I'm assuming most of us are living in the United States. You want to also make sure that you dial in that meal timing like I talked about. Where I see the biggest problems here is just make a hard and fast rule with yourself that you do not— you are not a snacker and you do not eat after dinner. You close the kitchen, you lock the door. In my world, if I could have like a special little thing that happened every night, not for me, because I've made this a hard and fast rule. Took a while though. I was not perfect overnight. This took time. But what would be great is like just at night there was like this automatic lock to your kitchen, to your like fridge and pantry, and you could not get in. I say that and I think back to when I was on Dr. Phil and literally I had people, we would look through their whole house because they would stash food all over the place. Glove box, you know, the bedroom nightstand. But I'm sure you're not doing that. Lock the kitchen after dinner. Do not go back in unless it's for a little water. Water can shut down evening hunger pangs. Just don't do so much you have to pee throughout the night. But make sure that you stop eating after dinner and stop eating minimally 2 hours before bed. 3 or more is better, better, better. If you want to recomp, which is build muscle, lose fat. Notice I said build muscle, lose fat. I want you to always take a muscle-first approach to this. Build muscle first. Muscles where we burn fat, muscles where we can target and raise metabolism and improve insulin sensitivity, and then we'll start to burn fat. If you're staying the same, nothing's happening. This is where you can factor in some cycling caloric restriction, a technique, a tool that I learned from the fabulous Dr. Bill Campbell, who runs the only physique lab in the country. And what he has discovered there is that if you do caloric restriction, so you know what you're eating every day because you've tracked it on a food app. I like the Cronometer app. We'll link to it in the show notes. So you know what you're eating every day. And what you do is you take your maintenance calories and then 5 days a week, eat 25% less than that, and 2 days a week, eat maintenance. Nope, I did not say 2 days a week is cheat days. We never do that. That is the silliest thing ever. Like a cheat meal becomes a cheat day, becomes a cheat week, becomes the way you live. Like, don't do that. It's okay to have a bite or two of something that you love. It's okay to have a piece of cake here and there. This is not going to, like, blow the world. That's diet thinking that's— that got us in trouble in the first place. But cyclic caloric restriction can work well. Your thyroid's not going to get impacted. You're not going to get diet fatigue, and it can help you get off some of that, like, body fat if it's just, like, holding steady on there. But again, we are doing this judiciously. We're not overdoing it. You can't lose more than 0.5 to 1% of body fat a week anyway of your total weight. As body fat. So we're being careful. Okey dokey. Super important. Here's what I would love. I would love for you right now, if you've been doing any of this, to knock it off. If you've been blaming yourself for your, like, feeling soft and fluffy, here's the reality. Women have more body fat than men. Hello? We do. Men only have 3 to 5% essential fat, fat they need to have on their body to survive. We have 10 to 13%. Like basically 2 to 3 times more. That's different. We— I always say the man's like a VW Bug. The woman is like a Ferrari. There is a lot going on under the hood. We got a lot more stuff cycling around there. And I do not believe that we were made to fast for long periods or overtrain. I think the men were made to be able to withstand that. And I know just when my husband and I are out on trips, Like recently in the Amazon, I monitored everything I was doing in the Amazon and brought stuff with me, made sure I had extra food, maintained my weight exactly, by the way. Yay me. He lost 10 pounds. I was like, dude, because he can just do that. Like he can go out, he can go out for long periods of time. I'm on a 5-hour hike hungry and all I can think about, I'm like hallucinating about my really amazing gluten-free, no sugar cheesecake that I make. And he's like, what are you, what are you meditating on? I go, like that. So like, men just can do these things way easier than women. I think they were built for fasting. We got it. And maybe you're the unicorn out there that does it fine. Hey, you do you. But I really want you to honor your physiology, right? And instead of asking like, how many calories should I eat— and yes, I'm not going to say calories don't matter— but what I'd really love you to look at is instead of how many calories, what are the things that I need to eat? And especially in terms of my macros, in terms of protein, in terms of fiber, in terms of the different plants for my gut microbiome, in terms of the healthy fats for controlling inflammation. What do I need to eat to really support my hormones and to help me build muscle? An empowering question. So the other one is no fun whatsoever. And if you want to look at like one thing that you could do right now, take from this right now, if you want to take the biggest thing to support your hormones right now, it would be please, please, please prioritize sleep. I bet you thought I was gonna say protein. This all matters, but if your sleep sucks, everything sucks. So you've got to do this. Now, in terms of thinking about weight loss, I want to shift weight loss always to fat loss, because if you want to lose a lot of weight, you'd lose a lot of muscle. It's heavy. And the way I want you to think about fat loss moving forward is first, before you ever think about losing fat, could we pinky promise to first focus on building muscle? It would change everything for you. Everything for you would be amazing because the reality is your muscle supports your hormones. When your hormones are supported, fat loss tox is like just like the side effect. It just happens. It's almost automatic, effortless. It stops being a fight. Besides sleep, you, my friend, are not broken. Your body is not failing you. It's responding to the signals it's getting: stress, poor sleep, underfueling, overtraining, blood sugar swings. You see, those things, they don't tell your body to burn fat. They tell your body to store it. So instead of asking, how few calories can I eat? Here's what I want you to do. Start asking, how do I best support my hormones? How do I best support my muscle? And this week, make one simple shift. Protect your sleep. Build a little strength. Eat optimal protein so you send a safety signal to your body that you have enough. Because when your hormones feel supported, fat loss becomes a side effect. It stops being a fight. And if you want more science-backed, real-life strategies to build muscle, balance hormones, and age powerfully after 40, make sure you subscribe to this channel because I share new videos every week to help you stop battling your body and start building a stronger, leaner, more resilient one. I'll see you in the next one. 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. And third, text to 2-813-567-7677. 5-2-6-2-7. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. 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. 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 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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