De-Aging: Hitting the Brakes on Aging with JJ Virgin

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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, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I give you the latest cutting edge intel to help you look, feel and think better. Now, today we're going to be talking about aging. And you know, I don't want to use the term anti aging because to me, anti aging means like that you just that you're dead. So I like the term de aging, meaning that we really are turning back the clock. And so today we are going to talk about things that you can do to help you slow down or put the brakes on the aging process. And they're actually pretty simple things to do. Maybe not easy, but simple. And they're probably things that you could be doing every day right now, not realizing how much they are just making you age faster. So that's what we're talking about today. And you know who we're talking about it with? Me. Because as a woman in my 50s, I am obsessed with how to de age, as you can imagine, and I have been for years. So I'm going to jump right in. I'm going to talk about this subject and I'm going to share with you. When I was writing the Sugar Impact diet book, you know, one of the things that is clear that one of the most aging things that you can do is eat sugar. And yet you see so many people eating diets that are what I would call high sugar impact and just, you know, and then slathering on a face cream, that ain't gonna do it. And one of the most important things that you can do to slow down or turn around the aging process is to lower your sugar impact. Now, in the sugar impact diet, I talk about a different way to look at sugar. And this is never more important than in terms of aging. And here's why. The way we look at how much sugar something has in it right now is we either look at outright sugar grams in a food, and that is problematic because all carbohydrates turn to sugar. So you can't just look at sugar grams in a food because it would make white flour seem like it's okay, but white flour turns quickly into sugar and is aging. So can't look at it that way. But the other way we tend to look at this is we look at it in terms of glycemic index, how much a food impacts our blood sugar response. This doesn't work well either because one type of sugar that is the most aging sugar of all, fructose, looks fine on the glycemic index because the only organ that can metabolize fructose is the liver. So fructose, unlike all the other sugars, goes straight to the liver. It doesn't raise blood sugar. So it seems like it would be cool. Go straight to the liver, where if it can't be turned into glycogen and stored there, and it probably can't because there's not very much room there. And when it's full, it's full, your body turns it into fat. But here's the big challenge. Besides the obvious problem there of fructose is giving you fat. Fructose also glycates more than any other sugar. And you do not want to glycate. That's when these that combines with proteins to cross link. And you know, the best way to explain how that looks is the crust on bread. We don't want to look like the crust on bread right. At all. That's glycation. Fructose glycates seven times more than any other sugar. So instead of looking at glycemic index or looking at the sugar grams in a food, what I want you to now start to look at is sugar impact, because this is really looking at how much something raises your blood sugar, how much something raises your insulin, how much fructose something has in it. And that ultimately is going to be the clear sign of how much something is aging you. And again, it's aging you due to that process of glycation where protein combines, doesn't need enzymes to combine with sugar. And so you're going to end up with this little problem. In fact, I'm just pulling it up right now because I think the best thing to do is give you a great example of it. Glycation is the result of a typically covalent bonding of a protein or lipid molecule with a sugar molecule, so such as fructose or glucose without the controlling action of an enzyme. So it's called glycation or called glycosylation. And what actually happens here is that you create These things called AGEs advanced glycation end products. And this is what you want to avoid at all costs, because this is what really is ultimately what is aging you. Okay, so that's the first thing is we are going to lower sugar impact. So we'll avoid the glycation and we'll avoid the ages, the advanced glycation end products. Now the next one, stress. And when we talk about stress, we've got to talk about something called telomeres, because forever. You know, one of the things I did when I first started talking about weight loss is I started to look at some stress. Because stress can make you gain weight, stress can make you age faster, stress can make your gut leaky, stress can make you crave sugar. I mean, there's so many things stress can do. But the challenge at the time was there wasn't a really good way to easily measure it. Then we found we had the adrenal salivary index, where we could look at your stress hormones so we could see how your adrenals were handling it, which really tells. Okay, you know what, for phase of adrenal exhaustion, are you in. Are you in that initial phase where cortisol comes up, or have you started to burn out your adrenals? For cortisol's coming back down, but it doesn't show what has been the ramification of your body. Now there's a lot of symptoms like I talked about, like leaky gut and low serotonin. But ultimately, what would be the impact? And here's the challenge. We have these things called telomeres. And telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, and they're linked to aging. And what happens as we age is that these things start to shorten and you lose this genetic material. So it's telomere shortening. This is not what you want. This is like one of the ways we can now measure, you know, are you aging faster? And this happens due to stress. So not only can stress make you gain weight, stress make you crave sugar, stress make your gut more leaky, stress lower your immune system. But stress is one of the most aging things that you can do. Now, one of the big ways that you can start to turn this around, there's actually a couple different ways that you can start to handle stress. One of the things I've got to do a shout out for, because we're talking about de aging burst style or high intensity interval style training. And the reason this is so key is it's going to have a dual effect here. The first thing that it's going to do is it's Going to help your sympathetic nervous system handle stress better because you go all out and you recover. You go all out and you recover. So your body gets used to, okay, stress recover. Stress recover, stress recover. Not the chronic stress of say, endurance style training that actually ages you faster and creates more oxidative stress. But the, and we're going to get to that actually in a minute. But the other thing here that it does is it helps your body raise growth hormone. And that's one of the things that we key want to do. Another thing that I love to do to help manage stress is meditation or tapping. Now I'm going to say tapping because I, full disclosure, have not gotten my meditation down yet. And my girlfriend, Emily Fletcher created Ziva Meditation and I promised her that I would do this with her and she is going to hold me to this. So I, I'm gonna do it. However, in the interim, I am doing emotional freedom technique or tapping, and that can help lower stress hormones. So the big takeaway there is, hey, we're not gonna get rid of stress. I mean, that, that's, that's not happening. What we need to do is change our response to stress because really there's stressful things around us, but it's our response that creates the issue for us. So you need to learn how to modify that response. And tapping is one thing that can help there. Vitamin C is another thing that can help there. Meditation is another thing that can help. The takeaway is find the thing that works for you. All right, now I kind of started talking about this a little bit already because we're talking about the three things that you should swap so you don't get old fast. And the first, of course is, is sugar. We talked about lowering your sugar impact. And then the next one is stress. And looking at how you can learn to manage stress so you're not being reactive. So it's a proactive approach to stress and so that you don't have those short little telomeres. We do not want short, stubby little telomeres. And then the next one. And I started to talk about one of the ways that we could handle stress through high intensity interval training. Well, the contrast, the opposite of high intensity interval training is endurance style training. And endurance style training is another thing that will age you. And you know, back when I was in graduate school, years and years and years ago, we were taught that if you wanted to lose weight, you had to lower your fat. You know, eat a high carb, low fat diet, lower your calories, and do a lot of cardio long slow distance. In fact, it had to be at least over 30 minutes. Ideally it was 60 minutes plus running, cycling. With your heart rate up to about 70% of its max. This is actually the worst thing that you can do for, for helping with reducing with de aging. Because all of that chronic exercise says a couple things. Number one, you're breathing more, so it's more oxidative stress. So it's aging. That's the biggest reason that's aging is oxidative stress, but also because of the hormone response. Remember, your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And what you're doing there is raising stress hormones. What we want to do instead is have not a catabolic breakdown effect from exercise. We actually want to have an anabolic or growth response from exercise. And the exercise that does well is burst style training. Resistance training is burst style training. You push hard and you recover. You push hard and you recover. But my favorite type of burst style training or high intensity interval training is where you get your full body involved and especially your legs. And so things like jumping jacks, sprints where you're using your arms, or running up the stairs using your arms, Turkish get ups, burpees. And again, what's cool here is this is done based on your. Your level. So if you're just a beginner and you're not, you're needing to get in shape. I was gonna say you're rotten shape. No, it's an opportunity. You're getting into shape. You may find that for you, literally getting up and down out of the chair ten times is bursting. That's fine. Hey, you're doing it. It's getting started. But it's something that you can do for all out for say, 30 to 60 seconds. I'm talking all out. You cannot keep going. And then you recover. Usually takes about twice as long to recover and you recover actively. So if you sprint or you were running upstairs, you walk it off, or you walk down the stairs and you do it actively to help buffer back the lactic acid that you kicked out during the intense period. So that you can buffer it back. You can actually use it. Your body can use it as fuel source so you can recover and do it again. And you do this to accumulate 4 to 8 total minutes of the hard step of the bursting when you do this. This is very anabolic. There's a couple cool things I talked about earlier that it helps your sympathetic nervous system learn how to handle stress better. But the other thing is that lactic acid triggers a growth hormone response. And it's all about growth hormone. It's all about growth hormone. And speaking of growth hormone, another cool thing that you can do that can help you de age is to sleep well. And of course, paradoxically, we tend to sleep worse as we age because we start to have more issues with our hormone balance, our sex hormone balance, and our cortisol starting to come up. But sleeping is when we're raising our growth hormone. It is key and critical to help you here. So you've got to make sure that you're sleeping well. And that's generally eight to nine hours of sleep during the normal circadian rhythm. And so what you have to do to do that is you have to reverse engineer a good night's sleep. What I see with most people is all of a sudden, they go, crap, it's 11. They've been doing something stimulating. Maybe they're watching TV, bright lights on, loud noise, and all of a sudden they think they're going to go run into bed, put on their PJs, and go to sleep. And that is not gonna happen. No way. What you need to do is prepare your body for sleep. So what you want to do is start dialing down the lights, dropping down the room temperature, take a hot bath. Then your body's gonna work to recover from it. And maybe do some lavender essential oils, because that's very good and calming. It's great if you took a bath with some Epsom salts. Magnesium is relaxing, helps you sleep. But you are starting to take it down. And you have what my buddy, Dr. Michael Bruce calls the power down hour before bed, where technology is out, lights are coming down. You read a good, but not great book. This is when we putter. You know, you get yourself set up for the next day, but you're not doing big brain stuff that's going to light your brain back up. And you're certainly not looking at technology that's going to get your neurons fired up again. So that is key because you need to have a really good night's sleep to help raise that growth hormone and lower stress hormones. Now, I'm going to give you two little bonus points of things that can also help here. And one of them, you know, one of the things that scientists know is the only way to extend lifespan. And you know, when you really look at this, this isn't about lifespan. It's about a new concept called healthspan. You want, it's how healthy are you for how long? Like, who wants to live a long Life in crappy health. You want to live an amazing life in incredible health and then one day go out like a light bulb. So that's what healthspan is. And what scientists found that the only real way to increase your lifespan was through caloric restriction with optimal nutrition, meaning you're eating less because it's keeping insulin low. But what you're eating really matters. Of course, this is not super fun, so I've got better news for you. One of the things that mimics caloric restriction with optimal nutrition and activates something called the SIRT gene is resveratrol. Now, this does not mean go drink bottles of wine, sadly enough. If it was, I'd be writing the drink bottles of wine de age diet, trust me. But you do get resveratrol, of course, in red wine and Pinot Noir is the highest one. But you can't get enough to really make the difference. That's when you're really going to want to take a supplement on. Now the other thing that can help is making sure that you get a protein rich breakfast because that will also help boost growth hormone along with some resistance training. But a protein rich breakfast can help there as well. Alrighty, so just to recap, find ways to be proactive so you're not reactive about stress. Lower your sugar impact because sugar, especially fructose sugar, is the most aging food. And stop the long slow distance. Trash your treadmill and start doing some burst style training. Get the resveratrol in and make sure you're getting protein rich breakfast. Super important there. Alrighty. Now after the, after the break here, I've got all these papers that you like. You know how Rush Limbaugh was always but jamming all the papers. I'm sort of doing my Rush Limbaugh invitation here. So after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question, so be sure to stay with me.

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Welcome back. Alrighty. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question comes from Kara in Greensboro. And she says, JJ, I need to lose about 20 pounds. And so my trainer recommended that before I start weight training, I just do cardio first. But I hear you saying that I should be doing interval training and weight training, so what do I do? All right, Kara. This takes me back to my trainer days of decades ago. And honestly, I remember way back when, and it was just me and Body by Jake. We were like the first, first personal trainers, I think, in the United States. And we were told that when you wanted to lose weight, you should do a lot of cardio first. You shouldn't do any weights, you'll just get bigger. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All this stuff. And what I was seeing with my clients, and I was also training people at the time down at Gold's Gym in Venice, which is the mecca of bodybuilding. And what I noticed was those people did no cardio. And there were people, there were women in their 60s that I would have killed to have their body that looked amazing. Started to think of the marathon runners versus the sprinters. And I'm like going, I'd much rather look like a sprinter. They're fitter, they're younger, they're leaner, they're more muscular than a marathon runner. And it turns out a marathon runner has the muscle mass of a couch potato. But I was looking because all of what I was being taught in school was do long, slow distance, go up, get your heart rate up, you know, work out, do cardio for 30 to 60 minutes. And just like you heard, it was like, do cardio first. Don't do any weight training. It'll make you bigger. Blah, blah, blah. But I started to do more and more weight training with my clients. Now, remember, my female clients were really scared of doing this at first, but the more weight training we did, the smaller they got, because muscle acts like metabolic Spanx. It's going to help your body burn fat better. It's going to improve insulin sensitivity. It raises growth hormone, but also holds everything in tighter. You can't spot reduce, but you can spot tone, okay? And you want to hold everything in tighter, and then you'll burn more body fat overall. I remember reading this research by Miriam Nelson of Tufts, and she found that when women lifted weights, they got smaller. And I remember now I'm thinking of a client I had 15 years ago who came in, she wanted to lose. Gosh, I think she wanted to lose ten pounds. And she wanted to. She came and said, okay, I want to lose 10 pounds and I want to go down, you know, two sizes in my clothes. What was interesting was she didn't lose any weight. She went down two sizes in her clothes, dropped body fat, dropped her waist measurement, lost no weight because she put on muscle and dropped fat. And fat. It's just a backpack of crap you're carrying around that does nothing for you. In fact, it's even worse than that because it's sends these inflammatory messages out to your body. And muscle requires more energy to be on your body, but it also holds everything in tighter, which is so important. So do not be afraid, my friend Kara, of lifting weights when you need to lose weight. It's actually the most important thing that you can do. I don't have people doing cardio long, slow distance at all anymore. I want them to move more. We should all be walking more. Get a dog. But that's not your exercise. Your exercise has to be hot, sweaty, and should hurt a bit. So start those weights. Start them. Now. Fold everything in tighter and get more insulin sensitive. It will help you drop the body fat. All right, if you'd like to submit a question, just head over to my Facebook page, JJVirginOfficial. Now, this is the official gratitude portion of the show where I highlight the review of the week. And by the way, I read all of these reviews. I read them, read them, read them. I love them. So I'm so appreciative of you sending these reviews. If you pop on over to itunes, that's where this is all happening. And what I'm going to do each week is grab someone and thank them for doing it and read their review. So here you go. Let's see, I have here JJ is the best and it's by Carm422 and says JJ is truly the best and has uncovered the foods causing us to keep from losing weight. I find her fascinating and her diet truly works. Big thumbs up. All right, thank you so much, Carm422 for that and thank you all for joining me today. I am so honored to have you on the podcast and be spending this time with you. And until next week, pop on over to my Facebook official page. Let me know what you'd love to hear more about. Ask some questions because I love to answer the questions on the show and thanks so much for being part of the community. Bye.

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