GLP-1s / Ozempic vs. “Natural” Weight Loss - What's The Better Path For Women Over 40?

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I'm JJ Virgin PhD dropout. Sorry mom turned four time New York Times Best Selling Authority. I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall.

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Osembic vs Natural Weight Loss what's the better one for a woman over 40? So you hear all these negatives about GLP1s, I'm going to go first through some of the positives about them because I'm just kind of shocked at how much bad press is out there. And if you start to really dig into the literature and you can do this, go on to PubMed, you're going to find out that GLP1s do a lot more than just appetite suppression. Now we think of GLP1 agonist drugs for what they do for satiety, and it is true they slow down stomach emptying so you feel fuller longer. And they also shut off what is now all over the media as food noise, which can be cool because it can shut off not just food noise, but what the research is showing is that it might shut off other types of addictive things like shopping noise, alcohol noise. So we've got those two parts of it. I think those have been talked about a lot. What hasn't been talked about are some of the other benefits, one of them being inflammation and and quickly reducing systemic inflammation. And one of them is helping with things like autoimmune diseases. It also can be good for mood. Now you've probably heard stuff out there saying, oh, it increases suicidal tendencies and depression. Actually the research is showing the opposite, that it could be good for mood as well. In fact, I have one person I know who's on it who literally calls it his happy shot. The other thing that it can do is it's it's being explored by Brian Johnson now as a longevity peptide. And remember, this ultimately is a peptide. It's being used in drug form at higher doses. In lower doses, though, you could be using this as a longevity peptide because of what it does for regeneration. It can regenerate the cardiovascular system, the heart, the brain, the kidneys, and it also can help with bone and muscle. You've probably heard, and we'll talk about the cons of muscle loss, but done correctly, this can actually help your body build muscle and build bone. It could also help get off of polypharmacy. One of the things you're gonna hear about GLP1s is, oh, you'll have to be on it for life. But here's the reality. What if you were someone with morbid obesity who tried everything and couldn't lose the weight, and you're on a high blood pressure medication, you're on cholesterol medication, maybe you're on diabetes medication, and you were able to utilize this to, to get into normal weight range and get off all those other medications, but you had to stay on this for life. I would argue that being on this for life at a lower dose versus being on a whole host of other medications is probably better and safer for you. So there's some of the pros for why GLP1 agonist drugs can be helpful. And my flip is always gonna be the drug is using a higher dose of it. What would happen if you used the lowest dose you possibly needed and in more of a compounded form? More on that in a moment. What about the cons? So one of the things you'll hear about using these drugs is that you can lose a lot of muscle. Here's what I'll tell you about that. Any poorly designed diet with extreme caloric restriction will cause muscle loss anywhere from 20 to 50%. So, yes, that's true. Is it the drug or is it the poorly designed diet? It will be the poorly designed diet. And here it can be especially problematic because if you're using a higher dose of this and, and you shut down satiety signals, you are going to really have to make sure you're getting in protein, the protein that you need or potentially don't use as high of a dose. So you still have some of that signaling going on. The next thing you're going to need to make sure of is that you're exercising. So whenever someone goes on caloric restriction, they have to make sure that they're getting optimal protein and they're doing resistance training. If you're not doing those two things. With caloric restriction, whether you're using a GLP1 agonist or or not, you will lose muscle. And in fact in most diets with caloric restriction you will lose a little bit of muscle. The goal is for it to be 10% or less as you're getting closer to goal weight. If you're someone who is morbidly obese, then you're going to lose muscle and fat because you also have some of your lean tissue is supporting that fat. As you get closer to goal weight, you really want to minimize the that skeletal muscle loss. Ideally hold onto it or build it. One of the other issues with the cons is that oftentimes the dosing is higher than it needs to be and that someone's put on this drug without putting the right lifestyle habits in place first. So I'm going to talk about that in a second and then of course the expense. Now here's the reality. The drug costs are so much different in our country than in other countries or in compounding pharmacy situations. So it's interesting in some of the other countries that the drug cost is a tenth of what it is here. So maybe we need to ask about that. Here's what's crazy about all of this. Whether you're on a GLP1 agonist drug or a GLP1 compounded peptide, you're going to want to be using the strategies I'm going to share right now to make sure that if you are working on weight loss that that weight loss is primarily fat loss with minimal amounts of of fat free mass loss. Mostly the fat free mass loss would be that supporting the fat which is about 3% and very little skeletal muscle mass loss. So whether you're on a GLP1 Agonist or not, here's what you're going to want to make sure that you're doing. And ideally, before you would ever go on a GLP1 drug, you would have to show that you're doing these things consistently to qualify to be able to use the drug. Think about how different that would be. It's like you have to earn the right to use this drug. Number one, you need to make sure that you are getting in protein. I have a range I have with people of 0.7 to 1 gram. But when you are focusing on fat loss, I like to push it a little higher, even higher than 1 gram for a couple different reasons. Number one, protein is thermic. So it is the most thermic of the three macronutrients. Fat doesn't take much for it to be assimilated onto your body. It's like 3% or less of the calories from fat are utilized in the metabolism of fat. Carbohydrates at about 5 to 10% protein is 20 to 30% of those calories from protein are used in the digestion and assimilation of protein. So muscle protein synthesis is a very expensive process. So the first thing we want to make sure of is that you're eating optimal protein. It's going to help your body naturally raise GLP1. It's going to help you have a better thermic response, and you also are going to be more satiated and more satisfied because it's giving you these essential amino acids that can help with not just satiety, but satisfaction reducing the cravings. So that's the first piece. The second piece is that you've got to be moving more all throughout the day, that you're tracking your activity level and making sure that you're getting in that 8,000 steps or more each day. Average person's getting like three to 4,000 steps in a day. So, so we're moving more and then number three, that we're making sure we're getting resistance training in so that you are giving the stimulus your body needs to hold onto or build muscle while you're losing fat. Super duper important. So you've got all of that as that foundation. Then you work with an integrative doc, a functional medicine doc, to be able to utilize the lowest amount of this peptide as possible. Now, here's the question mark. Turns out that if you're obese, if you have fatty liver, if you have insulin resistance, which I probably just named 93% of the population. We now know that less than 7% of the population is metabolically healthy. Probably a third of the population has fatty liver disease. Well, if you have fatty liver disease, if you're obese, if you're insulin resistant, you, you probably also are either GLP1 resistant, meaning your body can't hear the signal to it, or you're not producing what you should be producing. And so what we wanna make sure of is that while you're doing any of this peptide therapy, you're also doing what you can to get your body back to baseline. One of the cool things GLP1s do is they start to quickly improve insulin sensitivity. They start to have your body release insulin at the right times, not all the time, but they also to help to improve insulin sensitivity. Of course, we also know resistance training does that too. So we'll be attacking those problems from both sides. And we're reducing inflammation, which is super important for your body to be able to build muscle, because inflammation blocks muscle protein synthesis. So, first thing is using the lowest amount of this peptide as possible. What I see with a lot of these drugs, versions of it, the Ozempic, Mounjaro, et cetera, is their starting dose is high. When you work with a compounding pharmacist, then you can start with a low dose and use the least amount to get the effect that you need, which is really the goal. And ideally, you're using other things alongside it that could help raise GLP1. So we know that fiber and protein do that. Exercise does it as well. Getting good sleep does it as well. Eating earlier in the day can help as well. So eating per the circadian rhythm. But there's also a couple nutrients that can help here. One of them is a product called Calicurb. This is a product from New Zealand they spent 10 years researching. It's a bitter hops product that they patented and they found that it could raise GLP1 for four to six hours after taking it, which is pretty substantial. So that's one thing that you can try, because I would love to see you doing the things that naturally will help your body produce this and using the lowest dose of the peptide. The other thing that you can use is allulose. Allulose is a rare sugar that doesn't get absorbed by the small intestine, but doesn't cause any GI distress either. Doesn't raise blood sugar. In fact, it can lower it and raises GLP1. So you could try this as a sweetener, 10 grams before a meal as the way to do this. And you can also try something called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. This is something my buddy, Dr. Jeff Bland discovered, and it is a bitter extract that can raise GLP1 as well. So there's some things you can do here naturally to support this as you are working through this. So you start with the lowest dose, you raise it only as much as you need to, to again, shut off the food noise and improve the satiety. You monitor your blood sugar, you check your overall inflammation and. And you see how you're feeling with it. And as you're going along, one of the things you really want to make sure that you're doing is checking your skeletal muscle and checking your body fat. So here's how you do this. Ideally, the first thing you're going to do before you ever start on this is you go get either a DEXA scan or something called an in body scan. Now, I prefer the DEXA because the DEXA is going to be the most valid. But what you're really looking for is a relative change. So if you can't get to a DEXA scan, which is another way we look at bone mineral density, but it's also looking at skeletal muscle mass, body fat, and then where that body fat's located. If you can't do that, an inbody is the second best choice. And then you monitor this at home with a bioimpedance scale. And these are pretty inexpensive. You can get one for under 100 bucks and a tape measure. And the reason I want you to do a tape measure is because that will help you really monitor your visceral adipose tissue, how much fat you have around your abdominal area. And you want to make sure that as you are losing weight, you're losing your waist. I like to say if you're losing weight but not losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. And what you want to ideally get to is your waist being half or less of your height. And if you're a man, your waist to hip ratio should be 1 or less. For a woman, 0.8 or less. You're going to monitor all the way along because this will tell you if you're losing fat or you're losing muscle. And again, you want to make sure you're holding onto muscle as you're losing fat. And the way you're doing that is making sure you're getting in that protein and you're doing that resistance training. A little hack that you can do if you're having challenges getting in enough protein is to supplement as well with some essential amino acids because these don't have the calories, so you won't have the satiety issues that you would have with the protein powder. So it's another thing that you can do there as well. Couple other things that can help here. And again, whether you're on a GLP one or not, these are all the things that you want to do. They become even more important as you're on a GLP1. Number one is, of course, ensuring optimum protein. When I'm working with someone, they have to be tracking and using a food scale. We underestimate how much we eat overall, but I think we also overestimate how much protein we're getting in. I was just coaching someone and they said, oh, no, I get in a lot of Protein. And I go, well, tell me what you had for breakfast. And they said, I had a couple oatmeal and an egg. Well, that was about 8, 7 to 8 grams of protein. Right. So if you are monitoring this by recording it into an a tracking app, that's going to tell you exactly what you're doing and you're weighing in your food. There's no error in there because it's not possible. So you're going to measure everything and track it. You're going to eat protein first to make sure it gets in, then you're going to be eating your vegetables and fiber next. Because what we're really trying to do is recondition that gut microbiome so it can produce the GLP one that you want it to produce. Something that can also help there is the probiotic Akkermansia that's been found to help the gut produce GLP1. And then you also want to make sure that you are not eating ultra processed food, that you're really swapping out the majority of that. Apparently now it's like 70% of our diet of the average person's diet in the US is ultra processed food. Swap that out for eating as minimally processed as possible because it's going to be more thermic and have more fiber. And the other one you want to swap out are those seed oils because they can contribute to the inflammation and the insulin resistance. Basically, we're trying to crowd out some of that bad stuff that could have gotten you into this problem in the first place with the good stuff. One other piece of this that you probably wouldn't think about in terms of weight loss is hydration. But if you are just mildly dehydrated, it can actually contribute to storing more fat, more visceral adipose tissue. Because mild dehydration not only raises cortisol and slows down metabolism a bit, it also causes your body to take glycogen from the liver and turn it into fructose and store it as fat so that you'll have fluid there for when you get super dehydrated. So we want to make sure we're staying well hydrated using that scale at home, the bioimpedance scale can help you track that as well. But super duper important now we are using the minimum amount of GLP1 that needed or you might even find as you're deploying all these tactics that you're able to get far enough with the allulose or the callocurb or the HTB and all the diet changes that you don't even need it. And some of those things can help you if you are in a transition state with the GLP1s to transition down off of them as well. And you might find that you get to a point where you're using GLP1s every other week, once a month, in order to keep some things at bay. I find people are using them now successfully to lower autoimmune disease, to lower inflammation, to lower some of the osteoarthritic issues. So I think we're going to start to hear of GLP1s for a lot of other issues. But again, can we help our body create more of it ourselves through the things like the Akkermansia and the HGP and the callocurb? One other piece of the puzzle that's not talked about a lot, that's super important here is we are using these products so that we can drop body fat. And there's two sides to that coin. What we now know is that you are better off having higher body fat with more muscle than you are having low body fat, low muscle. Now, the best place of all is to have good muscle with low body fat. But if you had to choose, higher body fat with more muscle is better than no muscle, no body fat. So one of the things that we want to make sure of is that you're holding on to or building muscles. You're doing this, but you're also going to be losing fat. And one of the challenges is in our body fat. This is where we store toxins. And as you are dropping this body fat, you want to make sure that you're getting the toxins out of your body because it is very dangerous to have high circulating toxins. So there's a couple different things that you can do to support that. You're already doing it in the diet by eating protein. We need protein to escort the toxins out of the body and by getting in that fiber, which traps the. Traps the toxins and helps us get them out and poop. The other thing we're doing is drinking a lot of fluids. Of course, we talked about why you need to stay well hydrated. But again, one of the ways we get toxins out, or two of the ways, is sweat and pee. Other things that you can do to help here are to dry brush and then also to sweat. And you can sweat either through sauna or exercise or ideally both. Super important there. But we want to make sure that as you're dropping this fat, that you're also dropping the toxins alongside it. Now, as you're losing weight, there can be a tendency you hear people hit plateaus or they start to gain weight. You also need to make sure that you continue to keep that activity level up because sometimes as we cut calories, we tend to move less. We want to make sure you're keeping your 8,000 steps or more each day. You're keeping that resistance training going because if you lose muscle, you'll also of course, slow, slow down your metabolism. So keep the metabolism up by moving more throughout the day by doing that resistance training. And the final word of course is sleep is mission critical here as well, because just one poor night of sleep, you're insulin resistant. So sleep goes hand in hand with all these strategies. So here's the bottom line on all of this. GLP1s can be a great support system for helping you start to lose the fat off your body, shut off the food noise, reduce the inflammation, improve the insulin sensitivity. However, they need to be done in conjunction with all of the strategies I talked about. The process should be the strategies come first, then the GLP one can come in. What we've been doing is the opposite and that's where we've created a lot of the problems, because people will start to use the GLP1 and go, screw it, I don't need the strategies and because I'm losing weight. But they don't realize that what they're losing is muscle, not fat. And then they get to a point where they're where they want to be weight wise, except they look like a smaller version of themselves and they've slowed down their metabolism and caused metabolic adaptation and made themselves worse, not better. So put the strategies in place, then see if you actually need the GLP1. If you do start with the lowest dose possible, this probably won't be something that you can get from a traditional doctor with an Rx because it's too high of a dose. Go as low as possible. Use a compounding pharmacy and a functional medicine practitioner to do so and see how much you need. So here's what's important is you can only lose about a half percent to a percent of your body and body fat each week. So you want to be really careful in looking at how much weight you want to lose to make sure that you're not going for rapid weight loss. Because rapid weight loss means muscle loss, not fat loss. It is why it's so important for you to track all along the way using a bioimpedance machine and check ins with a DEXA or an inbody in a doctor's office. But ideally, let's say that you are £200 and you'd like to be £150. You look at this and go, okay, I can only lose a half percent to a percent of my body weight each week, max. That's what you want to look at. And for muscle mass, you'd be lucky if you're looking at putting on muscle mass. You might be able to put on a half pound to a pound of muscle a month. It's a very slow thing, so ideally you're working on doing this slowly. And if you find that when you're on a GLP1 drug, you're starting to lose weight quickly, back off the dose you're using too high of a dose, it's messed with your appetite too much and you've got to slow it down. Because if you're losing weight quickly, you're not losing body fat, you're losing muscle mass. And that is going to make you worse in the long run, not better. The last thing that you want to do is lose muscle, then go off the drugs, then gain back fat. You've just created a bigger problem than you started with. Be sure sure to join me next.

Time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch.

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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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