How in the World Do You Lose Weight in Your 40s?

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How in the world do you lose weight in your 40s? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times Best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Erin Green Newman from Facebook asks, how in the world do you lose weight in your 40s? I know everyone mentions more protein, but can you sub with a plant based shake to get the same results?

Oh Erin, I wish I knew more.

Information from you, but with the amount of information I know I am going to deconstruct this and give you a lot of things to think about and you can just roll through them one by one. So if you've been struggling to lose weight, this is for you. I'll be right back.

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Maybe you're not sweating a lot, pooping a lot, you're not eating high fiber diet, you've been drinking out a lot of plastic. You know you've just got a bigger toxic load. It can actually slow down your metabolism, lower your body temperature, impact your thyroid function and also create more estrogen. So that's one of the first things that I like to do, is get you started on a good detox. Just to make sure we've got those pathways chugging along, everything is working. Once we've got that, the next thing is to make sure that you are getting rid of your hidden food intolerances. Because if you're eating healthy foods, but some of those healthy foods are hurting you. Things like gluten and dairy and soy and corn and eggs and peanuts. I love eggs. But for a lot of people, they can trigger an immune response and create inflammation and lead to insulin sensitivity and stress and cause you to hold onto weight or even gain weight and crave the very foods that are hurting you. So the next thing that I have you do is go through the virgin diet to uncover your hidden food intolerances. Cause they're hidden, we gotta find them. And during that time, you're also repairing your gut health. Because what's really interesting is if you've tweaked your gut microbiome by like artificial sweeteners or gluten or Fructose, pain medications, a lot of different things mess up your intestinal lining and your gut microbiome a lot of sugar. Then you actually can extract more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. And you can become more glucose intolerant and pre diabetic. So got to make sure that your gut's all dialed. Next up is then to lower your sugar impact. That's my sugar impact diet where we really teach you to eat from the trifecta, a protein, fat and fiber, really get good blood sugar control, get over your sweet cravings and get to the point where your body's shifted into being a fat burner, not a sugar burner. And when you do that, it's like, boo. You know, the sun comes out and the birds are singing. You're able to easily burn off stored fat for fuel. You lose that belly fat. You can go easily 4 to 6 hours between meals without eating. In fact, you'll go, did I eat lunch? And you won't be able to remember. That's a great sign that you are now a fat burner when you do that. Now you can easily start to do some intermittent fasting or keto diet, which if you were doing those prior to this, you'd struggle. Once you've got that nailed and now you can start to throw in some intermittent fasting and maybe play around with keto, see how that works for you. We're going to start to look at your adrenals. Now here's the thing. If you've got any issues with adrenal function, then intermittent fasting and keto won't be a good thing for you until you fix them. And so an adrenal test. What I really like to do with adrenals, honestly is take an adrenal salivary index test that looks at your cortisol throughout the day and also looks at your cortisol and DHEA ratios. Here's the thing. If you are struggling with stress and you don't have stress reducing activities built into your life and some fun and joy too. And you're probably going, what the heck are you talking about? Fun, joy, stress reducing activities, things like tapping from my buddy Nick Ortner or Ziva, meditation from my pal Emily Fletcher, you know, fun, fun activities, things that make you laugh, things that you love, maybe you're doggy hot baths, et cetera, and getting good sleep, seven to nine hours of quality sleep every night. You probably have a little adrenal problem. If you have adrenal problem, you're gonna have higher fasting blood sugar, you're gonna crave more sugar, you're gonna have difficulty sleeping, you're gonna break down muscle, not be able to build it well, and it'll probably mess up your thyroid function which comes next. If your thyroid's not working correctly, it is going to grind your weight loss attempts to a halt. So make sure that you are working with a good functional medicine doctor. Shout out to my buddy Dr. Alan Christiansen and that you really know how to look at your levels correctly rather than going to a traditional doc. Getting one number a tsh, finding out that it's in range and being told you are fine. If you're struggling with being cold, difficulty losing weight, difficulty putting on muscle, low sex drive, hormonal imbalances, little bit yellow tinge to the skin, hair falling out, nails breaking, elevated cholesterol, constipation, any of those things. Make sure you really get your thyroid workup done well by a functional medicine doc. And then finally your sex hormones. If you are a female and you've got any kind of irregularities with your period, I want you to make sure check and see if you're now heading into perimenopause because that will make all of this a little bit challenging. And again, the best thing that you would do if you are is make sure your thyroid and adrenals are working really well here. The better off you are going into menopause, the easier of a time you will have. All right, there's your checklist. Erin, go at it and let me know how it goes. Bye. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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