I Take Creatine Every Day and Here’s Why

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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 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, 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 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 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.

This episode is brought to you by McAfee.

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You to suspicious texts, emails and deep fake videos. Learn more@mcafee.com Online protection Two of the most important parts of healthy aging are muscle mass and bone density. And there's one supplement that helps menopausal women build both creatine and no, it's not just for bodybuilders. Let's talk about why this is the most important supplement you're probably not taking and why now. Right now is the best time to start. So creatine is an amino acid stored in your well, mainly in your skeletal muscle, but also in your brain and gut that your body uses for high energy activities like high intensity interval training and resistance training. Now, creatine is naturally occurring. Your body makes about a gram per day in your liver, and you also get it from the muscles of animals like meat, chicken and seafood. But the amount you need to get all of the benefits I'm going to share with you is pretty much impossible to get from diet alone, which is why it's such a popular supplement. In fact, creatine monohydrate is the most studied supplement of all time. It's safe and effective, and the International Society of Sports Nutrition declared that creatine monohydrate is the most effective ergogenic nutritional supplement currently available to athletes, with the intent of increasing high intensity exercise capacity and lean body mass during training. Hint, it's not just for athletes, right? I take it every single day, and I think it is one of the core supplements women should be taking as they head into menopause. It turns out that women have 70 to 80% less tissue stores of creatine than men and that we likely also get less from our diet as well. And by the way, if you're vegan or vegetarian, you are definitely getting less. Now because we're deficient, we often see a bigger impact from supplementation than men do. But when I say that don't worry, I don't mean that you're going to get big. In fact, the studies show that unlike men Women don't usually gain weight or get bigger with creatine and if there is any weight gain it's due to better muscle hydration and you want that. It's a good thing. So of course if you're using a bio and pain scale to track your body composition, and I hope you are, rather than focusing on weight alone, you're going to see this improvement in your total body water. However, I want to reiterate that the studies show that women generally do not gain weight taking creatine. Now I've been posting a lot about creatine on Social and I've noticed a lot of fear around the supplement and to be honest, I think you should be way more concerned about not taking it. I've seen some pretty crazy urban legends around it like issues with kidney function or bloating and this is just not the case. I think it is one of the most important supplements a 40 plus year old woman should be taking and for more than just body composition. Now, while I'm going to focus first on body comp and strength, there are even more amazing benefits to creatine that I'll share as well. So first of all, creatine can help you work out harder and not fatigue as quickly. We store creatine in our muscles as phosphocreatine. When you're doing that high intensity interval training or resistance training workout, your body generates energy in the form of ATP from phosphocreatine. ATP is broken down and energy is released. One study showed women having a 15% increase in exercise performance when supplementing with creatine for 10 weeks. And by the way men, they had only a 6% increase. Now I went on creatine six months ago and the change was noticeable. Now not only did my strength increase noticeably, but I could also do more sets. So my husband and I go to the gym together and he now is consistently trying to find me and say hey, time to go home when it used to be the opposite. I'm literally stronger now at 60 than I've ever been in my life and I credit that with finally getting on creatine and I don't want you to wait like I did. Now speaking of strength and muscle mass, besides improving performance and delaying fatigue, creatine can improve muscle mass and bone in menopausal women. There was a meta analysis done of 13 studies that examined the effects of creatine supplementation and resistance exercise on muscle mass and other health indicators in adults over the age of 50 years old and it found that creatine supplementation now important in combination with resistance exercise, Right? No magic bullets. Promotes muscle accretion and builds strength in older adults more effectively than just doing the resistance training. Their analysis also revealed that creatine supplementation benefits bone health by increasing bone mineral density and improving the markers of bone biology. A recent Meta analysis of 357 elderly individuals. I love that they say elderly is 64 years old. I'm sorry, that is not elderly study. So these people were participating in an average of 12 and a half weeks of resistance training. And they found that participants supplementing their diet with creatine experienced greater gains in muscle mass, strength and functional capacity. These findings were corroborated in another meta analysis of 405 elderly participants. Again 64 years old. Shame on them. Who experienced greater gains in muscle mass and upper body strength with creatine supplementation during resistance training compared to just the training alone. So what does all this mean? This means that creatine supplementation can help you build muscle more than if you just did the resistance training. Why wouldn't you want to do that? No downside, all positive. And you know, as you age, you can lose muscle mass and creatine supplementation can help prevent that. Sarcopenia and bone loss that happens as we age. Doesn't have to. Now, hopefully at this point, you're already convinced that this is something you'll want to add to your anti aging arsenal. And if I haven't even gotten to the brain benefits yet, and when you hear these, you're going to be like, okay, now I'm all in. I'm always looking at things to help with brain. I started researching creatine for my son Grant because he suffered a severe traumatic brain injury at 16. And we've done so many things. He's 27 now, he's doing well, but I always want the edge for him. And I'm always looking for anything that can help support his brain function. Now, I always thought of creatine, I'll be honest, for body composition and for sports performance. Then I started digging into the research and I found that it also improves cognitive function. And when I saw that you can guess what I did, I immediately put him on it. Now, as I dug deeper into this, I realized that this is another reason it's the perfect supplement for peri and postmenopausal women. Women have been reported to have lower levels of creatine in the brain. Not just our tissues. Right. But also in the brain, particularly in the frontal lobe. And that frontal lobe controls your mood Your cognition, your memory and your emotions. As a result of these sex differences in brain creatine concentrations, supplementation may be even more effective for women for supporting a pro energetic environment in the brain. Now, along with lower creatine levels in the brain, women have double the depression that men do. And one review in 2021 on brain health in women found that women with a major depressive disorder who supplemented their daily antidepressant with 5 grams of creatine responded twice as fast and experienced remission of depression at twice the rate of women who only took the antidepressant. And of course, we're not even talking about the body count benefits, right? So creatine can also help the brain function better under times of stress. Who doesn't have that? And sleep deprivation. Now, brain activity results in a rapid reduction than those phosphocreatine levels that I talked about earlier, that you need to maintain ATP levels to make brain energy. Therefore, when you're under times of high mental stress, those require higher phosphocreatine demand higher ATP turnover could be impaired during those times. And creatine supplementation can support greater neural ATP resynthesis, which means you got a cognitive advantage for tasks that rely on all those frontal cortex tasks, things like cognition and attention and memory. Creatine supplementation in humans has consistently demonstrated improved cognitive performance and improved brain function and reduced mental fatigue during stressful times. So not only will you be able to work out harder, which helps build muscle, you'll reduce the risk of sarcopenia, you'll have better bone health, and you'll have better brain function. And that isn't even all of it. Studies show that creatine can also help protect the skin from UV exposure, create new skin cells, help the skin stay hydrated and reduce wrinkles and increase firmness. Now, this is early, early intel, and most of this is, is using creatine topically. So we're going to have to watch and see what happens there. But you know, if you're putting it on or taking it in, I don't really see the difference. The big question here is, how much should I take? When should I take it? So again, creatine monohydrates the form I want you to take, because it's been the most studied, and the recommended doses generally for women are somewhere in the 3 to 5 grams. If you're 120 pounds or less, let's start at 3 grams. If you're above that, go to 5 grams. There's a whole thing where you can do loading doses of creatine to get your tissue saturated faster, like in five to seven days, or you can just get on it and in about a month you're going to reach that tissue saturation and that's when you're really going to start to feel the effects of it. There is some evidence to suggest that taking it before a workout could help, but I'm guessing that's because those people didn't have tissue saturation yet. My recommendation is to take it consistently every single day. And that means just take it when you're going to take it. For me, I like to use the powdered form and put it into my loaded smoothie every morning. But I also capsules. So if I'm traveling and I'm not doing my smoothie, I still stay on it. I am like crazy vigilant about not missing a dose on this because I really want to make sure I keep my tissue stores up. Mainly because I have noticed a massive difference in taking this. And you know, with so many supplements you take it, you don't feel any different, not with this one. Such a big difference. And I want you to have that feeling too. I want to help you feel your healthiest, your happiest, your strongest self. Because remember, as you age, it's not just aging gracefully. In fact, forget that. I want you to be able to age powerfully and creatine is huge for this. And now that you know how to supplement to support your muscles, you're going to need to start working them out, right? Remember, all the studies I just cited said creatine plus resistance training. So to help you get started, watch this next video where I help you walk through my resistance training routine so you know exactly what to do and when to do it to get the best results.

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