Can’t Lose Weight? Get Healthy First. Over-Exercising Could Be Doing More Harm Than Good

Hey, it's J.J. here. You know, I've been talking about environmental toxins forever, and laundry detergent is a sneaky one. A lot of them contain harsh chemicals like dyes, preservatives, and even UV brighteners. Those brighteners don't actually clean anything. They just coat fabric so your eyes think things look whiter or brighter. That's more chemicals I don't want on my family sheets or skin.

And.

And if you've got sensitive skin or allergies around the house, this can be a big problem. That's what got my attention about Earth Breeze. It looks like a dryer sheet, but it's actually laundry detergent. You toss one in the washer and that's it. No pouring, no mess, and no heavy plastic jug. Their packaging is lightweight cardboard, which helps reduce plastic waste. And if you choose the fragrance free option, it's gentle, hypoallergenic, non irritating, and non sensitizing. I really like how simple it is and how fresh and clean everything comes out without those unnecessary chemicals. Right now you can try Earth Breeze for up to 40% off with free gifts@earthbreeze.com virgin that's earthbreeze.com virgin for up to 40% off plus free gifts on your first order. Hey, JJ here. Can you believe how fast the holidays are knocking at the door this year? One minute it's pumpkin spice season, the next you're getting your guest room ready and wondering where their wrapping paper went. And that's when I turned to Wayfair. From bedding and towels to holiday decor and last minute stocking stuffers, Wayfair has everything you need to get your home and holidays together fast. And for way less. With Wayfair, I know I can refresh my guest room in no time. Maybe I'll add a soft new comforter or a few holiday throw pillows. With Wayfair, it's so easy and everything arrives super fast. Plus, there's free shipping for any order over $35 easy and total peace of mind. So whether you're hosting, gifting, or just adding those final festive touches, Wayfair has your back. And when the holidays wind down, Wayfair has everything you need to tuck it all neatly away. Smart storage solutions for every room from the kitchen to the closet. Get organized, refreshed, and ready for the holidays. For way less, head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. Wayfair. Every style, every home that's W a Y f a I r.com Ray Ban.

Meta Glasses come with open Ear audio so you can listen to your favorite music without blocking out the world around you.

Hey Meta, Play Gorgeous.

Here's Gorgeous by Doja Cat. You can also ask Meta AI questions.

Hey Meta, when's Doja Cat's next concert?

Doja Cat is playing at the Los Angeles Theater next Tuesday. Sweet Ray Ban Meta Glasses available at Ray Ban stores and other authorized retailers. Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. In each episode, I put the power of health in your hands and share ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more so you can look and feel better fast.

If you'd rather watch the video, hey.

I did put on my makeup and.

Do my hair, so check it out.

On my YouTube channel.

Hey, it's J.J. here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend, and honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time, and that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year. @monarch.com with code Virgin, Saving on your.

Education should be a right, not a competition. At University of Phoenix, you'll get the best scholarship or savings you qualify for. Simple as that. Explore scholarship options at University of Phoenix. Are you killing yourself at the gym or on your peloton and waking up at 4am to go some extra miles? How's that working for you? Look, if you're exercising to lose weight and it's not working, there's a reason. I know it's tempting to think you're not doing enough, so then you're Frustrated and you go to the gym and.

You push harder and harder.

As crazy as it seems, there actually is such a thing as too much and over exercising, it could be keeping on the pounds. Want to know what works? Stick around. Hey, I'm J.J. and if you want to keep up with things that will help you lose weight and keep it from coming, coming back, let's stay connected. Hit like on this video and subscribe to this channel, and that'll get it done. All right, I've been doing this series on all of the reasons other than your diet that you can't lose weight. So far, we've talked about stress, your gut, sleep, and toxins. So check out those other videos as well if you really want to make sure you give yourself the best chance of losing weight and making sure it doesn't come back. Now we're going to talk about exercise. Now, exercise is a good thing, right? What's the first thing you think of when you decide to lose weight? What should you do? Diet and exercise. Diet and exercise. It's all you ever hear. But too much working out could be working against your weight loss goals and may even do more harm than good. I've had clients who've exercised every single day and the pounds didn't break budge. What the heck is going on? Let me start by saying exercise is an amazing and necessary thing for your health. And you know, little things like how long you want to live, so there's that. It gives you amazing benefits like stronger bones, better insulin sensitivity. And better insulin sensitivity is key to being a better fat burner, a better metabolism because, you know, muscle requires more energy to stay on your body, healthier brain, and it helps detoxify you, but it doesn't do as well as everyone previously thought is to help you lose weight. Now, a little exercise, sure, you'll drop a few pounds, but more and more research is being published that suggests exercising won't help you lose as much weight as you probably think. In 2016, researchers showed that the calories you burn basically plus plateau at a certain point because our bodies adapt to the increased physical activity. This is what they said, and I quote, total energy expenditure increases with physical activity at low activity levels, but plateaus at higher activity levels as the body adapts to maintain total energy expenditure within a narrow range. All right, that's a mouthful. In other words, exercise has diminishing returns. Some of the dangers of extreme exercise, like ultra marathoning are pretty obvious, and I'm guessing that's not your issue. It's definitely not mine. But if you want to lose weight, it makes sense that you're going to hit the gym or soul cycle or go out for a run on top of going on a diet, right? So that's great. It's when you constantly overdo that, the bad things can happen. Of course, it depends on things like your age, your gender, and your general health, too. But over exercising for anyone can wreak havoc on more than just your weight. It can impact your heart, your tendons, your ligaments, your immune system, you name it. In fact, one study showed that women were less likely to have a heart attack or stroke if they were physically active at least once a week. But the risk of heart attacks and strokes shot up for women who exercised hard every day. So intense exercise doesn't actually give you more benefits and it could be hurting you. Now that's intense exercise, hard every single day. Okay, listen to me on that one. But let's go through this. So if you are overdoing it, exercise boosts stress hormones and spikes cortisol, because your body doesn't know the difference between exercise stress and normal stress. So over exercising means high cortisol, and that starts a bad cascade, this cascade of breaking down muscle instead of building it, storing more fat around your belly, and can even mess with your thyroid function. Plus, too much cortisol also makes you moody, irritable. You can't concentrate or sleep, and sometimes can even make you hungrier. So you feel bad and you're hungry all the time, which of course can boomerang you into overeating and weight gain. And again, now I'm talking lots of high intensity exercise, like you're doing big time CrossFit every single day, not rotating it in a couple times a week. All right, Number two, another sign of overtraining is obviously being tired all the time. You feel like every workout is a struggle and your performance is either not getting better or it's getting worse. Or maybe you just can't go as long or as hard as you used to or lift as much. And being constantly exhausted beats you up mentally and physically, which means you could get hurt. So if you notice that your resting heart rate is riding higher than normal, or your workouts are making you feel exhausted rather than energized, it's another sign that you could be overdoing it. Next one, your immune system is probably taking a beating too. So moderate exercise can help your immune system, but when you overdo it, it actually suppresses it. So you think you're getting healthier and you're setting yourself up to get sicker. Plus that over exercise also increases something called oxidative stress, which is a marker of accelerated aging. So then what is the answer? How often should you exercise? How long? How hard? All right, here we go. I'm going to break it down. Here's what I recommend. First off, move more. So before you do anything else and start all the fancy stuff, just get moving. And this is where it's great to use a Fitbit or an Apple watch or an Oura ring, something that will actually track you and especially those ones that say stand up, right? So you want to just move more throughout the day. And big, big one is moving after you eat your last meal. Boy, that helps lower the blood sugar response to a meal. So work that into your routine. Then hiit high intensity interval training. That is where you're changing your steady state cardio, like going out for a jog and changing into warming up with an easy walk and then sprinting for 20 to 60 seconds and walking it off for twice as long and repeating to accumulate four to eight total minutes of the hard stuff in small bursts. Why is that important? That actually helps your body stimulate the growth of the boost of growth hormone. And it also helps train your sympathetic nervous system on how to handle stress better. So I like you to do that three times a week. Next up, resistance training. Pump it up. And I always say you want to pump it up to build your metabolic Spanx. What do I mean by that? Well, you know, Spanx holds everything in tighter. Metabolic Spanx means when you build muscle, it holds everything in tighter and boosts your metabolism along with it. So I like you to hit each body part at least twice a week with resistance training. And then finally, what I call mindful movement. This is the things like yoga and tai chi and qigong that really create that mind body connection that helps heal and reorganize your nervous system. And most importantly, I want you to mix this all up. Cross train your diet, cross train your exercise, right? And make sure. And this is super important. Probably the most important of all is that you have good recovery. That if you're going to push a really hard workout, make sure that you eat well and rest well afterwards. Now the other thing I'm going to throw out there is that if you're super focused on weight loss, you might be overdoing everything. And on top of working out too hard, maybe you're also overdoing the dieting and not eating enough. And you know, I am not a fan of that. That is if you're not eating enough and your body doesn't get the fuel it needs, it is not going to be able to recover from these workouts and build the muscle that you need for a good, healthy metabolism. And remember, you got to heal your metabolism in order to lose weight. When you do that, if you're working out too hard and you're losing muscle, it slows down your body to conserve calories. And guess what? Then you can pack on more fat or get sick. So if the main reason you're out there over exercising is because you want to lose weight and the scale is not budging, rethink how much you're exercising. I mean, how much more can you do? Really? Listen to your body, get some rest, cut back, or stop exercising when you don't feel well or under a lot of stress. I mean, case in point, in my 20s, my body fat was going between 22 and 25%. I was working out like a crazy person. As a personal trainer, I would go running with clients every day. I'd always end the day at the gym myself. So I was working out a couple hours a day. 22 to 25% body fat in my 20s should have been easier, right? In my 50s, I'm 13% body fat working out 30 to 60 minutes a day, averaging usually about 30 minutes. So proof is in the pudding. Well, the dairy free pudding, let's make it low sugar. So I really want you to change that mental programming that tells you if you're doing something bad or wrong. If you're not exercising hard every day. No, just make it that you move every day. All right? It's just like what I tell you about food. Too much healthy food is unhealthy. Well, too much exercise is too. So I'm giving you permission to take your foot off the gas, which again, may seem counterintuitive from a fitness hall of famer, but knock it off. All right? So eat to support your level of exercise. Hydrate more when you work out and get at least eight hours of sleep every night because you got to do that rest and recovery workout hard, rest and recover hard. And on those other days, hey, yeah, Take it a little bit easier. Do a nice walk, do some mindful exercise. All right? I hope you got some good tips in this video and you get the most out of those workouts in the future. And don't forget to like and subscribe so you get more tips to help you live your best healthy lifestyle. Now in the next video, we're going to tackle how to address the super common issue of thyroid fatigue and its impact on your metabolism. See you there. For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate.

And review, find me on Instagram, Facebook.

And my website, jjvirgin.com and don't forget to subscribe to my show so you won't miss a single episode. Go to subscribetojay.com thanks again for being with me this week.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.