I Just Turned 60, Here’s My Best Advice. I Wish I Knew This Sooner!

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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 Nutritionist specialist, Fitness.

Hall of Famer and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many 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 JJ, virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me. Travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things. And suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. 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 on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal this time. Don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks. Use the code virginonarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with.

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No one could have prepared me for turning 50 now. If they had, I would have just turned 50 way sooner. I mean, this decade has been an amazing time of possibility and reinvention, and I'm expecting my 60s to be even better now. Lucky for me, turns out having a positive attitude is super important in creating your best life at 50 and beyond. There was a study that was published in Attitudes and Social Cognition by researchers from Yale and Harvard and it was titled Longevity Increased by Positive Self Perceptions of Aging. Here's what it said. This is wild. It turns out that a positive attitude gives you seven and a half more years of life. Even when I adjusted for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness and functional health covariates. So my first step in Preparing for my 60th was to get fired up about it and to set new goals. Now it made me think back to 2019. I got to go to the Grammys, and that year JLo, Dolly Parton and Diana Ross were like center stage. Dolly Parton was really the host of the whole thing and she was 72 at the time. JLo was 50 and Diana was there celebrating her 70th and they were amazing. They literally stole the show, especially Dolly. And then there's Elon Musk's mom, who got her first modeling cover at age 70. And then recently I was talking to my buddy Dr. Daniel Amen and he reminded me that so often in sports the best stuff happens in the fourth quarter. So I am focused now on making sure that I can play full out in my 70s, my 80s, my 90s and beyond. And then I'm doing this daily to ensure that my body and brain are built to last. So here's what I'm up to and my hope is, is that if you are 50 plus, you use this as an inspiration and motivation to make your 50s and beyond your best years okay so first, since mindset is everything, I have amazing role models to help me here now. First, mindset and mindfulness. So I have amazing women that I learn from and hang out with. Mary Morrissey, Sam Horn, Sherry Salata. These are women who've gone before me and are living purpose driven lives. And I also have career goals that stretch and excite me. I'm actually more excited about my career now than ever. And I've been working in the wellness world in one form or another for 40 plus years. I set some experience goals over the next decade of what I want to do, where I want to travel to, and then I also set some goals on fitness. And this is a big one. I think one of the biggest challenges that happens with us is we get into these ruts. And the thing is, is as you're aging, if you're not continuing to progress in your fitness, you are going to be declining. You know, at the age of 40, we start losing 1% of our muscle a year up to that and up to 2 to 4% of our strength. And then at the age 60, that doubles. So what I decided was I'm going to put some really cool new fitness goals in and do things that take me out of my comfort zone. Like I will tell you, in two days, I'm going to do goat yoga. Yes, stay tuned on that. We've been doing all sorts of stuff. I took up rucking, I've been lifting way heavier weights, so that was one. And then I really set some relationship goals of who, you know, when you start to look at this, you go, who are the people that I really want to spend time with? You know, and how do I get to make sure that I'm spending more time with my family? And how do I make sure I'm getting to spend that really good quality time with my hubby? Now I also set spiritual goals and think about what you would love to continue, you know, how would you like to continue to grow? Someone asked me the other day, like, what was my, how are things working so well with my husband? What would I, would I give for my, you know, relationship success? And I say because we're always working on new personal development goals and doing cool new things, like going to a Dr. Joe Dispenza event. We go to a Transformation Leadership council. We're always working, reading a book together. So what can you do for spiritual goals to continue to push you out of your comfort zone? And by the way, all of these things, all these new experiences are focused on getting me out of My comfort zone. Now, I had that pleasure of hearing Steven Kotler talk about this recently and his new book Nar country. And he talks about pushing yourself in new activities. And again, it can be so easy to get into a rut, right? I mean, that is the thing that I'm fighting against is getting into a rut. So I've been really working on these new activities. So I'm going to walk through some of the things that I've done to see if they inspire you as well. Because I've really doubled down on, on wellness and self care. And I think one of the things that happens when we're 40 plus is we have to really take care of our nervous system. And so I actually started to gamify my self care and I got over this whole guilty feeling of like, oh my gosh, I'm taking a hot bath and I'm not working. I got over that. Okay. So the first thing that I did and I'm. I'm actually going to do another one in a week is I did a deep dive assessment on by using Adexa so that I could look at my skeletal muscle. I could look at my bones and my bone mineral density and then I could look at my fat mass, my vat fat and my. And again, what I really want to make sure is that right now I'm focused on putting on as much muscle as humanly possible. Now at home I have a bioimpedance scale and a tape measure. But what I did was I set some really ambitious goals for myself in terms of resistance training and lifting really heavy weights and even adding in some things like agility training and plyometric stuff. Not fun, I will tell you. Not fun at all. But boy, I am really seeing the benefits of it. It's fun to start challenging again. The other thing that I've been focusing on is sleep. And I will tell you that I genetically am not a good deep sleeper. It's a big challenge for me. And when I like did 23 me and every genetic test comes out and goes, you're not a good deep sleeper. I'm like, no kidding. What I have to do to really help with that cu. Any little thing, wine before bed, messed up deep sleep, you know, any kind of tech before bed, messed up deep sleep. So one of the things that I stopped doing in preparation for all this was I was got into a habit of drinking more wine than I should have. And now I drink one to three glasses a week. I really cut it way back and save it for special like if we're going out to dinner or we're with friends. But I've really been focusing on my sleep and working on, you know, I travel now with always with an eye mask, earplugs and those little stickers to cover all the lights because that's a problem. So that's the next thing. Now one of the other things that I've been working on, and I think this is a shift that happens in your 40s or 50s is that realization that you're going to need more self care. Like to get to the place where it was Easy in the 20s or 30s need more self care. And I had to get over some of the guilt of like taking that time for myself. So what I've done to do it is gamified, it's and gotten into some routines. But I found at night that my routine was I didn't have a specific routine. So what I did instead was give myself self care points. So I want to earn at least three self care points a day. Here's what counts as a self care. The cold plunge, meditation, working out, journaling, reading a positive book, a personal development book, taking hot Epsom salts bath, doing my red lights, using my sunlight and sauna, going for a walk after dinner. So all of those things count. And when I do it now I just say I have to. I'm. My goal is to get three a day or 21 a week. So if I miss a day then I can back it up onto the next. But I'm finding I'm getting more like four or five because I'm tend to be an overachiever. So try that one if you're having trouble like getting that stable routine. Now one night I sauna, one night I walk. But I find that's been really, really easy. Now in terms of my workout, the first thing that I did was really assess where I was at and I did a grip strength, I got a hand dynamometer, grip dynamometer. I did my grip strength and I checked how many push ups that I could do and what I really worked on was how many push ups could I hold. And another thing that you could do at home is you can do either a 1 mile walk test, you can do a 12 minute cardio test, but you want to do something where you can really see how your cardio is doing. Because I know for me one of the things I had to like deal with was that I will. I love to do resistance training, but I don't love yoga and I don't really like cardio So I had to really get serious with myself of getting my cardio built into my schedule, because I will blow it off, given the opportunity, Won't blow off my weights. I'll blow off my cardio, because I don't really like it. So I really measured that now, and I put some goals in there for myself. Ditto on my balance and flexibility. Because when you think about fitness as we age, and what's interesting, when you age, the biggest hallmarks of aging, like, there's now 12, but 11 of the 12, exercise improves. It's the only thing that is, like, the universal thing that's helping all of this exercise. And so I looked at where I might have a deficit, because when you look at what fitness is, it's balance. In fact, like, if you look at the statistics, here are the things that they look at that increase. All cause mortality. Inability to balance on one leg, poor muscle grip strength, slow gait. Right? But the things you look at are balance, flexibility, strength, stamina, and agility. And what I found was, now that I've been doing yoga, at least now I'm not mad at the teacher for making me balance. Now I understand why I'm doing it. So balance I'm now working on. Flexibility, I'm working on through yoga, too, because I kind of blew that off. But agility and cardio, I had to put back in the agility. When I lived in Palm Springs, I used to do a lot more hiking and HIIT training. And now I'm here, and there's no mountains in Florida, so I've got to get more of that in. So I've been doing more hiit through my StairMaster and Peloton, and I've been adding in some jump training and agility training into my weight workouts. So that's what I'm doing. So I'm really working on mixing it up again. In my resistance training, I added in some agility. I added in some sprint training. I started rotating in between different sets and reps because strength training tends to be you'll get the most strength when you do lower reps, like 1 to 5 reps. Heavy, heavy weight. You'll get the best hypertrophy when you do a little longer, like 8 to 15 reps. And each of these things, you really want to get towards failure. And you get more stamina when you start to get like 20, 30 and keep going. And so what I've been doing is rotating around. And I also stopped my fasted workouts. I started eating an hour before I went and worked out. And I've increased my strength 30%, which is wild. Now my cardio. In addition, in doing my hiit and doing my walking after dinner, I've also added in rucking. And that is where you put a vest on, a weighted vest. This is a super cool thing because it instantly adds more workload and it's also great for your skeleton because it's putting stress on your bones. So that's a super cool thing. And again, I'm doing yoga at least once a week. And I will tell you, between you and me, like I count every minute in there. It's not something I love, but I'm working on it. And I'm also working on trying some new sports. Super important. Now, what about diet? Here's the other thing I did. As I was turning 60, I decided I was going to track my macros to make sure that I'm getting the protein I need. Because of course as we age we get anabolic resistance. So we need more protein, not less. So I've been, my goal is 150 grams a day divided into three meals. So, you know, 30 to 50 grams at a meal, but basically I'm hitting about 50 at each meal. And the other thing I put in as a goal was to have really good diversity of my non starchy vegetables and fruit. And I actually was not really good about eating fruits. I've been getting two fruits a day and I've been getting like about 10 servings of non starchy vegetables a day. And that's really for microbiome, which I'll do another test on to see how that goes. And I've also been really good at doing enzymes. And what I discovered by doing all that and tracking my macros is I actually feel better with a little less fat. And I've pretty much been sticking with protein. Lots of non starchy vegetables, little fruit and little fat. And I feel better. And I'll cycle the carbs up a little bit if I'm working super duper hard. So that's another thing I've been doing. But generally I don't eat much in the way of the starchier carbs. I might do that once a week. Now the other thing that's made a huge difference, I've always been taking something called Geronol Geranol. It's a super interesting supplement that can help with bone density, help with hormone production. It's on the pathway that your body has to make CoQ10. So it's higher up on the chain, helps you make hormones, helps you with bone density, helps you with hot flashes. So I started that. But then I did two things that I think have made a big, big difference between that and the enzymes. Because when I look at aging, I say GG, definitely CoQ10, definitely enzymes to help digest your protein and fat. But there's two other things that I started that I know made a massive difference. One of them was creatine monohydrate. And I think any 140 plus should be on creatine, especially if you're a woman, because 70 to 80% lower creatine in women and especially if you're a vegan, like, should be like, you know, it's mission critical, should be absolutely essential. So that's the first one. I do five grams of that a day. And the other one I started was something called mitopure by timeline nutrition, which is something called urolithin A. And your gut ideally makes urolithin A from, from pomegranate and some of the other polyphenols. But turns out that very few of us do it. Like 30% of us can actually make that. And what's so important about this is that this helps your body do something called mitophagy. Now, you've probably heard about autophagy, which is why we do. We throw in little cycles of intermittent fasting. Like once a week, I'll do a very shortened feeding window to do more autophagy, which exercise does as well, which really helps you get rid of some of the damaged cells. Mitophagy is getting rid of the damaged cells in your mitochondria, which is super important. And what this company showed is that this product could help increase strength as much as 21% in just six weeks. So I've been doing this product and creatine, I think they have made a massive difference because I started to realize, you know, I've got to really focus on building muscle right now because, you know, in your 70s, 80s, 90s, it gets. Just gets more and more difficult to do this. And again, in our 40s and 50s, we start losing muscle if we're not actively fighting against it. And that doubles in your 60s. So this is really the time to go. We are going to build muscle. And the way I see it is aging is a privilege, right? And my mission is to help you make the most of it, mentally and physically. So if you are still figuring out how to navigate your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, and you're struggling with weight gain, hormones and other stressors, I want you to bookmark my playlist on aging to keep updated with my latest videos on how to eat, how to move, and how to live well as you get older.

Be 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 more importantly, that you're built to last.

And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website, JJvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetojay.com See you next time.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a fraud page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.