Do This Daily to Burn Fat & Build Muscle at the SAME TIME

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout.

Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author.

Yes, I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at.

Health conferences and trainings around the globe.

But I'm driven by my insane, insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep.

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People as I can. And that's why I created the well.

Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify.

The science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from.

Personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to.

Healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.

Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. 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 spring 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.

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You can burn fat and build muscle at the same time. It's a long standing myth that you can't work towards both these goals at once, which has led to decades of misguided advice. It's not weight you should be focusing on. After all, it's the weight, what that weight's made up of, and that's called your body composition. Now, recomping, losing fat and putting on muscle is different than weight loss. And it's a much more effective approach than what you've probably been doing your whole life. And when you do it this way, you get off that crazy roller coaster of losing weight, then gaining weight, then losing weight. All right, so first thing that I want you to do when you focus on recomping, which again is we're going to focus on losing fat and holding on to or putting on muscle same time, is protein. And I like to say eat protein first. Now you're going to want to be on the higher end of your protein range. I basically tell people to eat 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight, but I want you to go on the higher end. One gram per pound of target body weight. And I've created a simple little cheat sheet so that it's really easy for you to get that protein in. At least 30 grams at each meal. 40 to 50 is better, and at least 100 grams overall. But again, 1 gram per pound of target body weight. So you can get that at JJVirgin protein cheatsheet. So why do I want you to eat more protein? Well, it was interesting. I had Dr. Bill Campbell over to do a podcast and he mentioned to me that anyone he saw that tends to be very lean, for as a female always ate on the higher end of the protein levels. And what we know about that is people who are eating more protein, especially when they are in a caloric deficit, and we're going to talk about caloric restriction here in a moment, and it's not an evil word, um, they tended to hold onto or even build muscle as they lost fat. So that's the first thing is we know that if you're eating protein, especially eating protein first, because then we know that you got it in. That's why I tell people to eat protein first. I want to make sure you don't fill up on other stuff before you got your protein in, is that you are more satiated and more satisfied. You're going to make better food choices. You're going to have a bigger thermic effect from the protein and you're going to give your muscles the building blocks they need. First of all, the leucine to trigger muscle protein synthesis and then the essential amino acid. Amino acids they need to build muscle and to avoid being catabolic. Breaking down muscle, that's the very first one, is making sure that you're optimizing that protein. And there's been a ton of studies literally showing that when you're eating more protein in a caloric deficit, it can minimize or negate the loss of muscle mass. And that's what we're really trying to do here is minimize that muscle mass or help you put on muscle as you're losing fat. Over the past eight months, my husband lost 27 pounds of fat and put on 24 pounds of muscle. And he did that eating one gram per pound of target body weight of his protein and then doing the other things that I'm about to talk about. The next one was lowering sugar impact. Now, I was just with Dr. Rick Johnson and he wrote Nature Wants Us to Be Fat. And he showed some research where with mice where they didn't lose weight, he kept all calories controlled. He had one group of mice on a high sugar diet and one group of mice on a regular feed diet. On the high sugar diet, these mice gained fat and lost muscle and especially gained more visceral adipose tissue. You can change your body composition either in a good way or a bad way without losing any weight whatsoever. Based on your macronutrients. If you eat a higher sugar diet and especially a higher fructose diet, you will tend to have higher visceral fat and higher fat overall and lower muscle mass. So one of the things that I would love you to do is lower your sugar impact. I wrote a book called the Sugar Impact Diet and it is where I rated foods based on their sugar impact. They were either high, medium or low sugar impact. Low sugar impact foods. I'll give you an example of high sugar impact food would be a raisin. Basically dried food is candy. A medium sugar impact food would be a grape. It's A medium sugar fruit and a low sugar impact food would be a blueberry. So that is an example. Or a high sugar impact food. A sweet potato fry. A medium sugar impact food. Sweet potato, a low sugar impact food, butternut squash. So I rated the foods and what's interesting was when Tim, my husband, found out he was 25% body fat and went on this program, that's one of the things we did was we started to look at his sugar impact and he was eating things like siete chips, which, okay, a couple of those is fine. But he was kind of going a little overboard on some of these things. So what we did was we lowered his sugar impact as one of the things that he did. And that's going to help. So I would highly recommend, if you have not really done a deep dive into how many carbs you're eating and where they're coming from, to check out the sugar impact diet. Now the next thing is caloric restriction. And in order for you to lose weight now, you can lose body fat and put on muscle and shift some of that without much caloric restriction. If you're trying to keep your weight the same. But if you want to drop overall weight, you're going to need to be in caloric restriction. And if you want to lose body fat, it's going to be a little easier to be slightly in caloric restriction. Right. While you're putting on muscle, if you want to lose more body fat, you're going to increase the caloric restriction. Now I really like the research that Dr. Bill Campbell' been doing where he's found that if you want to hold on to or build muscle while losing body fat, that you do cycling caloric restriction. What does that mean? That means five days a week you are going to do 25% caloric restriction. Two days a week you're going to eat your maintenance calories. How do you know what this is? Well, the single best way to figure out your maintenance calories is to track what you're eating for one week. Do a macro audit. I love to use the Cronometer app. And if you go to jjvirgin.com chronometer that's where you can access that free app. And I like to use that app just for a week, just to get an average over the week of how many calories I need a day to maintain my weight. Then take 75% of those calories and eat that much, making sure that you're getting the optimal protein. Don't take it away from the protein. Right. Make sure you're getting the optimal amount of protein for five days and then two days eat normally. This does not mean, you know, go off on a binge. Just eat your maintenance calories and then rotate it five days on two days maintenance, five days caloric restriction, two days maintenance. What he found by doing that is people actually could sustain the diet way better, but they were able to put on some muscle mass by doing that. So I really love cycling caloric restriction. I also find it just makes it kind of easy, especially if you do the caloric restriction during the week and then kind of live life on the weekends. Now, next one that's going to help here is moving more. So when you look at your overall total daily energy expenditure, about 15 to 30% of your total daily energy expenditure is from moving activity. And when I think of activity, I think of both exercise and non exercise activity thermogenesis. So all activity. Now you might exercise, it might account for 5 to 10% of your daily activity expenditure. And there's only so much exercise you can do before you just aren't recovering well and you're just flat out tired. So where you have room is in moving more. And this has a way bigger impact on our metabolism than people realize. In fact, there was a study done where they had people just make sure they were walking 12,000 steps a day. And then one of the groups pushed and did faster walking three days a week and had significant shifts their body composition and their cardiovascular benefits. So what I have people do is, number one, start tracking what you're, how much you're moving. So track your steps, then increase your steps about 10% every couple days till you get to 8 to 12,000 steps. 12,000 better, but 8,000 is your bare minimum each day. Oh, and one of the ways you can get your 8 to 12,000 steps in a day. I am at a standup desk right now and just below me is a walking pad. So now I can have my meetings walking on a walking pad or I can go outside and walk. So it's an easy way to make sure you're getting your steps in. Now beyond just getting your steps in, add some intensity because again, that's going to help with bigger improvements in body composition. You'll still be taking the same amount of steps, but you just added intensity. There's three ways you can do this. Number one, go faster. Number two, add some hills. Well, I live in Florida, so there are no hills. You can add hills, you can add stairs. Right. But the third one is to add a weighted vest. It's called a rucking vest. And I think this is one of the easiest things that we can do, is just get yourself a vest that goes from 4 to 10 pounds to start. Just start with 5 pounds, keep it easy. But then you can add in 1 pound weights until you get to 10 pounds. And just try adding that in for part of your walk every day. And bonus points if you can do that one after dinner. Now, another thing that can make a big shift here because we're not just looking at changing your body composition, because it's not just body fat, it's where that body fat's located, right? And there's subcutaneous fat. That's fat just below your skin and the inches you can pinch. But truthfully, it's the inches you can't pinch that are the bigger problem. And that's something called your visceral adipose tissue. You can monitor this visceral adipose tissue through DEXA scans, through some of the bioimpedance scales, which are just going to make a prediction. It's not super accurate, but the way I really like to monitor at home is with a tape measure. And there's one called Renpho. That's a Bluetooth tape measure. I'll put it in the notes that will read into your phone so it's easy for you to track. And that's one you want to do every week, is do a waist to hip and waist to height tape measure. Because if you're losing weight but not losing your waist, you could be making yourself worse, not better. We want to make sure that the fat you're losing, that you're really focusing on losing that visceral adipose tissue. Because you literally want this visceral adipose tissue to be as close to zero as possible. No more than 10% of your overall body fat, but as close to zero as possible. And we know one of the ways you can lose that visceral adipose tissue is by lowering that sugar impact and especially getting the fructose out of helping with stress. Stress is another big one. Cortisol. We have a lot of cortisol receptors around our belly that causes us to lose belly fat. Hormone replacement therapy, especially estrogen, because we start to produce estrogen through our belly fat. But another one that can help us here is something called high intensity interval training. And so you're going to want to be doing some cardio every week. We'll talk resistance training next. But when you're doing your cardio training, see if two times a week you can do that cardio training as high intensity interval training. And what that means is, let's say that you started out on a bike, you would pedal and then you would pedal super hard for 30 to 60 seconds. Then you recover for twice as long by just pedaling and then you hit it hard again. And you do this to accumulate 4 to 8 total minutes of hard. You can do this in a variety of different phases. You can do that tabata training of 10 seconds on, 20 seconds off. I think it's 10 and 10. You can do one minute hard, one minute each, easy. But it's just really hard and recover. And hard and recover is the idea of high intensity interval training. And when I say hard, I'm talking hard. Like you should feel like at the end of that segment you can't go again. And then you recover till your breath comes back to normal. And when you're recovering, you're actually using that lactate that you've built as a fuel source. And then you recover and then you push it again. Next up, up beyond HIIT training is resistance training. Now, resistance training is absolutely critical here because if you are doing caloric restriction, you want to make sure that you hold on to or build muscle. You've got to be stimulating the muscles. There's two ways that we trigger muscle protein synthesis, resistance training and protein. Now, of course, we need the amino acids to be able to build the muscle, but we also need the stimulus to build the muscle, and that's resistance training. And resistance training means we're going to lift weights and do more than what our body's used to. So our body has to recover while we sleep. Right? So that we can do this. Now, when I think of resistance training, I think of working in full body compound movements as much as possible because it has a bigger metabolic cost. And again, when I think of that, I also know that when I'm training, I'm training to get better at life, not to get better at working out in the gym. And so I'm talking about things like squats and overhead presses and push ups and pull ups and bent over rows. I'll share how you can get more information on that in a minute. You're going to do big full body movements. You're going to do multiple sets. You can do repetitions, probably anywhere from 6 to 30 reps of multiple sets with about a minute to 3 minutes rest break in between. And for hypertrophy, that's the best range to build muscle. And when we build muscle, you improve insulin sensitivity, you have carbohydrates a place to land rather than on your belly fat. They're going to go into your muscles to be stored for energy for next time. It is the fastest way that can we can start to restore that insulin sensitivity and you're going to have a bigger metabolic cost from doing that workout because your body now has to recover from it. So if you are new to resistance training, do not worry. I did a whole video on this where I break down exactly what you need to do to create a routine with targeted strength training exercises that focus on upper body pushing, upper body pulling, hips and thigh and how to pull in your power core. All designed to improve your health, your strength and help you lose fat as well. So check out the next resistance training video and you'll also be able to download my resistance training cheat sheet.

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Foreign. Hey JJ here.

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