Get Rid of Over 40 Fat with JJ Virgin – Encore Presentation

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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's show is all about over 40 fat. Yep, over 40 fat. And more importantly, what it is and what you can do about it. And my guest is yours truly. And let me explain a little bit about why, how this all came to be and why I'm the one to talk about it. So in my 20s, I was paying my way through graduate school by personal training. And this was, this was a long, long time ago. And my top clients were in their 40s. And what I discovered pretty quickly is what we were being taught in school, which was to wait for it, eat less and exercise more, not only wasn't working, but it was making them worse, not better. So since I am not insane, I decided to look for what else I could do since I knew doing more of that, making them eat less and less and less and exercise more and more and more wasn't going to work. So as I started digging around, I discovered the phrase that I say all the time, that your body is not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. And what you do to that is going to make dramatic differences. And whether you burn fat or store it, whether you have great, steady, sustained energy or you crash and burn, whether you have food cravings or food no longer has a hold on you. And this is never more true than when we start to age. That is why I started to really look at what is over 40 fat. How does, how does this differ from, you know, people in their 20s and 30s? Because it isn't that your metabolism is slowing down. All right, it's not that. And I hear this all the time. My metabolism is slow. We can, we can kick that up. And I'm going to be doing another podcast strictly on that. But right now I just want to share with you what, what you need to consider when you are 40 plus, and why you shouldn't be trying to attempt to lose fat like a 20 year old or even a 30 year old, because it's different and here's what happens. So again, I'm going to welcome myself to the show, and I'm so glad I'm here with me today. And I'm going to be addressing over 40 fat, what you can do about it? And I'm going to dive into a couple things that make all the difference. So one of the things that happens as we age, and it happens both as we age and also because our body is not just a bank account, it's also a history book. And so all of the stuff that happens to you not only starts to shape the way you live and think and feel, but also what happens as you age is your cortisol can start to come up. Now, what happens with stress hormones is your adrenal glands pump out cortisol in the morning. It helps wake you up, and you have a rhythm throughout the day. When you're first under stress, your cortisol, your whole curve will start to lift up. And as you start to exhaust your adrenal glands, that curve actually starts to dump, usually first in the morning and then throughout the day, and adrenaline kicks in to take over. And that is that feeling that we all know so well that really, truly sucks, called tired and wired. Then you burn out your adrenaline, too, and then you got real problems because you're just exhausted all the time. But the challenge is, as it starts to happen, not only you're not going to sleep well, because you need. When cortisol is up and adrenaline is up, it can make you not sleep well, but it also lowers serotonin. And serotonin is going to convert to melatonin, and that's going to help you sleep well. So low serotonin causes sleep disturbances. So you have that issue. But also elevated cortisol means elevated blood sugar, and elevated blood sugar means more belly fat. So one of the first things to look at if, especially if you're eating well and you're exercising and you still have this belly fat that won't budge, is what the heck is going on with your stress hormones. And that's why over the years, I've looked at stress hormones so extensively, because they can make you gain fat, especially around your midsection. They can make you age faster and lose your sex drive. And today, of course, we're talking about over 40 fats. So if you. If you're really struggling with fat around the belly, there's one of two reasons it can be happening, and one of those reasons are stress hormones. And so just consider. And stress. And this is a lot of what I Talk about in the miracle mindset book, because stress really has to do with how we're reacting to things. And there are so many things that you can do on a daily basis to lower those stress hormones. And again, I talk about that a lot in the miracle mindset book because when my son was a victim of hit and run and literally in a com in the hospital, I had to massively, massively work to manage those stress hormones or they would have taken me down. And that would have been really detrimental. Because when your stress hormones really hit you hard, lowers your immune system, and then you'll get sick. And I couldn't have seen my son. So cortisol is the first one in terms of talking about that over 40 fat. Now, the next thing that can cause you to store more belly fat is insulin resistance. If you are one of those people who has trouble going more than a couple hours in between meals. If you have excess belly fat that just won't burn off if your triglycerides are elevated. Now, I like triglycerides to be 75 or less, but 150 or more is really a benchmark for pre diabetes or insulin resistance. And I'll explain what that is in a moment. Low HDLs for women under 50, for men under 40, elevated LDL cholesterol, elevated blood sugar, I think above 90 here. Elevated insulin. I like to see that between 2 and 5 for a fasting insulin. Any of these things. Elevated hemoglobin A1C. Really, you want that somewhere in the 4.5. But when it starts getting above 5, above 5.5, yep. All of those things can signal poor blood sugar balance and insulin resistance. So when we eat, we raise our blood sugar. When we raise our blood sugar, your pancreas pumps out insulin to bring that blood sugar back down. The challenge is if you're eating every couple of hours because you've fallen into that urban legend that we should be snacking. While your blood sugar comes down quickly, your insulin doesn't. So it keeps your insulin high. Your receptors start to get numb. It's sort of like you're at the rock concert and the music sounded really loud at the beginning, but then your ears adjust to it and you start to think it's not that loud. Same thing with insulin is you can actually kind of get these receptors to get sort of resistant to the message. So your body has to pump more and more and more out until finally your insulin, your beta cells in your pancreas, say no more. And they just can't keep up. And that's when you get diabetic. But there's a whole long process before then of pre diabetes insulin resistance. And when you've got elevated insulin, you're going to store more fat around your belly as well. So when you are losing weight, if you find that you're losing weight in your arms and legs and not your belly, you've got to start to look past this to what's going on with my stress hormones and what's going on with my insulin. Now, there's another issue at play here, and that is digestion. And one of the things that happens as we age, and it also happens due to stress, is that we lower our stomach acid. And when you lower your stomach acid, you are not going to be able to break down your protein. Well, if you can't break down your protein well, you can't make hormones carry hormones. You're going to see issues with your hair, skin, nails and bone. But moreover, you're not getting the nutrients that you need from your food. So one of the key things that you want to do, you'll be hungrier even, and you'll feel, you'll feel bloated, but you'll also be hungry. So one of the key things you want to look at here is a trial of enzymes that help digest protein like proteases, betaine. I, like anyone over the age of 30, 35, with any kind of stress, I feel should go on a trial of those. Unless you have an issue with ulcers, history of ulcers, different story. Now digestion's third, fourth one. Your metabolism. Okay, I hear all the time, oh, my gosh, my metabolism slow. So there are two things that can really impact your metabolism. One is thyroid function. And my gosh, my buddy Dr. Isabella Wentz told me it's now something like a quarter of the population has Hashimoto's disease. So thyroid disease is so prevalent, especially in women. And if your thyroid's slow, your metabolism is slow. That's just the bottom line. And it will also start to impact your stress hormones and your sex hormones. So this is a key master switch, the master metabolism regulator that you've got to get dialed in. So thyroid's key here, but one of the other ways that you can start to improve your metabolism quickly and also help restore insulin sensitivity and also help your body handle stress better through improving your lean body mass, your muscle mass, through burst and resistance training, burst style training and resistance training. And I talk a lot about these things in my community. So those are key here, is to do both of those things, because when you add more muscle, your body has to work harder to keep that muscle on your body. When you work out, like let's say you go for a walk, your body doesn't need to recover from a walk, that's just controlled falling. When you go and do a hard, intense workout either lifting weights at the gym, doing body weight exercises, going for a couple wind sprints and walking them off, your body has oxygen debt, has to recover and you've now stressed your muscles and they have to recover. And it's the work with that muscle protein turnover and the work of recovering that oxygen debt that boosts up your metabolism. Plus muscle just requires more energy to survive and exist on your body. So that's another key one. And the final thing that makes our over 40 fat, all of us, all of us listening. Over 40, our over 40 fat different is sex hormone balance. And this is when things start to go sideways, both for men and for women. Men, it generally starts a little later, although because of stress now we're starting to see this earlier. If you're under stress, if you have thyroid issues, you're going to start to see your estrogen and progesterone and testosterone go all over the board. And that's really the challenge is as your body is now going through either menopause or andropause is, there's a lot of changes taking place and for a while it just feels like you're on a hormone roller coaster. And as it starts to happen, you'll start to have cortisol shoot up, you'll become more insulin resistant, you'll be better at storing fat. So you'll feel like, you know, I just can't lose weight no matter what. And it's all in my gut. So this is another key one too. Now here's the cool thing about all of these things I just talked about, is that there's a lot of diet and lifestyle that comes into play here. Now of course there's great supplements too, and I've actually been working on formulating. I've got supplements to help with stress, balance supplements to help with hormone balance supplements to help with digestion, but not digesting your carbs, you don't want to do that. So we've got those things, things that can help with insulin. But what I want to really recommend here is that the first place that you start with this is number one awareness that you can't approach a 40 plus year old problem as a 20 year old body because you aren't okay. So let's just get really, let's just come come to grips with that is that we need to approach this differently and that we need to approach this by understanding that your body is truly chemistry lab. And so what we've got to do is work on promoting good hormone balance that's going to support your body's fat burning hormones to do their job while calming down those fat storing hormones and hunger hormones. And it is all possible to do that. And one of the first ways that you do that of course, is to change what's at the end of your fork and to make sure that you're eating by what I call the trifecta of protein, fat and fiber. So good, clean protein choices like wild fish, grass fed salmon, pastured pork and chicken, healthy fats like avocado and extra virgin olive oil, coconut oil, raw nuts and seeds, I like to dehydrate those or low roast them. But eating good healthy fats, clean protein and high fiber, low sugar impact foods so you've got a great slow release of energy and that helps keep everything balanced so you don't hijack your blood sugar and crank up your insulin and then start to work on doing the high intensity interval training that will get that muscle mass going and help restore insulin sensitivity. One of the fastest places to restore that is in the muscles. And then look at the things that you can do to help manage stress. One of my favorites is Tapping Emotional Freedom technique. We put that into the Miracle mindset academy because it's so powerful you can lower your stress hormones by 25% or more with tapping. And so find that thing that works for you there. It might be tapping, it might be laughing, it might be walking the dog, hanging out with friends. Whatever it is, get that built into your routine and then make time for your meals. Make time to chew. Yes, chew. It's kind of a lost art. Take time for that. Take those digestive enzymes and if you are starting to go into menopause hell, the better you are at managing your stress and the more you've got that thyroid dialed and the more you've got your lifestyle dialed, the better you're going to go through it. Right? And I, I personally take bioidentical hormones, but I do that once I have gotten to that place where everything else was stabilized. I did everything well with my thyroid, with my diet, with my exercise, with stress management and then I dialed that in. All right, so the big takeaway today is over 40. Fat is different. This isn't your son's or daughter's fat you got to treat it differently. And if you try to do it by starving yourself and over exercising, you, my friend, will make it worse, not better. And that's the last thing that we want. Now, after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is my favorite time of the show. It is the time, right? Answer a listener's question. And today's question comes from Karen in San Jose. And she says, jj, you talk all the time about how stressed, how bad stress is. But what if you're in a situation where you can't avoid it? So here's the deal, Karen. Like, no one knows that one better than me, right? I mean, being in a situation where my son is in a coma in a hospital bed and I'm facing the Biggest business situation ever in my life that has to make it so that I can continue to support my family. I still look back and people go, how did you do that? And I'm like, wow. Of course I figured out how I did it. I wrote the book Miracle Mindset on that. But like, in the middle of it, I was like, ah, I don't know. But one of the things that allowed me to get through it were a lot of the strategies that I had in place that I already had in what I call my toolbox to help me deal with it. I'm going to give you a couple of those right now because, you know, you can't always change the situation. You can always change your reaction. That is the magic of managing stress. There's going to be creepy people out there, there's going to be bad things that happen. It's how you show up, it's how you handle things that make all the difference. So I have a couple things that I put in place. And again, I talk about all of this in my book, the miracle mindset that I do on a daily basis to help me manage stress. And one of them is a gratitude practice where every single morning I get up and I pull out my journal and I write down at least three things that I'm grateful for. So that's one thing that I do. Another thing that I use when I feel like I'm just like, ah, do you know that feeling? I use something called emotional freedom technique or tapping. And it's interesting. Tapping. There was a study done by Dr. Dawson Church where he showed that you could reduce cortisol by as much as 27% through tapping. And this is crazy. I mean, it doesn't cost anything. It's just a technique you learn. I teach it in my Miracle Mindset Academy. It's amazing. So that's another one. Then, of course, nutrients are super important. When I was in the hospital with Grant, one of my friends, Dr. Hila Cash, showed up with literally a bag full of nutrients, which saved me. And some of the key things that I love are vitamin C. Vitamin C is super important for the adrenal glands. It's the number one vitamin used by the adrenal glands. So the two that really stand out to me are vitamin C and good B vitamins. So that's the step one. And then some things that can be really helpful here, Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, Eleutherococcus, panax, ginseng are some ones that can really help just keep things calm. Now I also love licorice and N acetyl tyrosine because they can help kind of take the pressure off the adrenal glands as well. So those are some things that you can do. That's one of the some of the supplements that I use to help me when I need to. I've managed to help a lot with my stress just purely throughout my lifestyle. And I always like to say, what can we do with diet? What can we do with lifestyle? And then let's supplement that with a good supplement routine, of course, a good daily multivitamin, mineral antioxidant, formula and essential fatty acids. That's, to me, part of your daily routine. And then you supplement on top of that. Okay. If you'd like to submit a question, just head over to my Facebook page, JJ Virgin Official. I'm always monitoring for great questions that I can bring onto the show. And I also go on my Facebook page pretty frequently and do Facebook lives, so I'd love to interact with you there as well. And thanks so much for joining me today. I want to remind you that all this information is only useful if you use it. If you take what I call courageous, inspired action, that means if you heard something today, you go, gosh, I need to be doing that. But maybe it feels a little uncomfortable or even a little bit scary.

Awesome.

That's perfect. That means that you're showing up bigger, you're pushing bigger, you're getting out of your comfort zone. So I want to encourage you to take courageous, inspired action because each time you do, you build resilience, and that's going to allow you to show up bigger in your life. And I want to leave you with this question to help open you up to even bigger possibilities in your life. And that is, what do you want to show up for in your life? All right, until next time, this is JJ Virgin signing off. Thanks so much for being with me.

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