Is there a natural form of OZEMPIC?

What if I told you that building muscle could be as effective? I'm gonna actually say more effective than liposuction without having to have surgery. I've been in the biz for 40 years and I've seen clients after they've had liposuction, and I'll be honest, I've never seen liposuction that I thought looked great. Contrast that with building muscle. I'm gonna dig in today how you can build muscle to help your body get leaner, and look better. So let's start off with how does building muscle help with fat loss? And what are those biological processes that occur when you build muscle that contribute to fat loss? Because here's the reality, as far as an exercise goes to burn fat, resistance training isn't really the thing, right? You're not going to burn as many calories as if you were doing cardio. You're not going to use as much fat for fuel if you were doing cardio. However, I would argue to you that the single best thing you could do to help your body be better at burning fat is build muscle. Here's why. Muscle is 3 important things to your body. Muscle is metabolic Spanx. This is where the liposuction thing comes in because it holds everything in tighter and it also boosts your resting energy expenditure. You use more calories throughout the day when you have more muscle on your body. It's really the only way you can affect that resting energy expenditure. Muscle's a sugar sponge. When you eat carbohydrates, if you've been lifting weights, you now have an area that your body can dispose glucose in. In fact, 80% of the glucose in your body is disposed into your muscles. This is a big disposal site. I call it a sugar sponge. You want basically your muscles to suck the sugar into them rather than converting it to fat and storing it on your belly. Right? Right. And then third, muscle is a multitasking messenger. Here's what's wild. When your muscles contract, they actually release something called myokines. There's 600 different of these types of messengers. They happen in your muscle, next door to your muscle, and all throughout your body. So they're an endocrine organ. And here's just a few of the great things that they can do. They can tell your body to burn fat. They can actually tell your body to take the white fat on your body and beige it to make it more metabolically active and easier to burn off. They tell your body to make new mitochondria. They tell your body to reduce inflammation. They tell your body to boost your immune system. Literally, it goes on and on and on. And we are still discovering all the different things that muscle does when it contracts. So it's super powerful. And muscle again impacts your resting energy expenditure. It's really important. Now, we used to think it was a big deal and it's not a big deal, but every little bit counts. So used to be like, oh, you add a pound of muscle, it's 100 more calories a day. Well, you could kind of do the math and go, that would never work. Work? It's probably about 10 calories a day. So each pound of muscle that you add— muscle is very metabolically active. It has to turn over. So it's breaking down and building up on your body. But more than that, again, remember it also is that sugar sponge. So it's boosting your metabolism, but also giving carbohydrates a place to be. Here's an important question. Can building muscle help reduce stubborn fat areas or does it just help with fat burning overall? The reality is there never was, never has been. Maybe this will change. Maybe we'll get new info, but as of now, You really can't spot reduce, but you can spot tone. They're different things. When you burn fat, you burn fat systemically. I wish I could say, you know what, leave the fat in my face, leave it here, please. And just burn it off my belly. Like, but we cannot do that. Now, there are some things like high-intensity interval training that target that visceral adipose tissue. But the reality is we burn fat systemically. However, we build muscle locally. So think about when you do resistance training, you're boosting your resting energy metabolism. You're also making yourself more insulin sensitive. So it makes it easier for you to use fat for fuel. And you are tightening up areas because when you build muscle, you create tone. And what is muscle tone? Muscle tone means you've got this nice partial contraction that holds everything in tight. And so we want that. That again is that metabolic Spanx that I spoke of. So can muscle really work like natural liposuction? And again, I have seen some liposuction in my days. Now, I actually had liposuction. I had an ounce of fat taken off like my— I guess it's called your flank— right around my hip area because I was harvesting stem cells. I was bruised for weeks. It was painful. And I don't— it still like doesn't look great to me. And it would— that was an ounce, an ounce. I'm like, how do people have like a pound or two of body fat taken off? Oh my gosh, crazy. But I have seen some aftereffects of liposuction and I don't like the way it looks versus when you put on muscle. And the way that that muscle tone looks on your body. Now here's the other reality. When you do liposuction, if you don't change what got you into that position with higher body fat in the first place, if you keep doing the same things, guess what? Your body fat will come back. Now it won't come back where it was because you took those fat cells out, but other fat cells will expand, which actually may be even worse than the ones you had in the first place. Like all of a sudden you may end up with, like, if you're a guy, man boobs, or maybe all of a sudden you're getting weird fat around your flanks, you know? So there's that situation too. Now, muscle, again, it's going to help you burn more, but it's also going to help you be more insulin sensitive. But can it help tighten loose skin after fat loss, like if you've had liposuction? And here's the reality: resistance training actually is good for skin tightening. Now, it's not dramatic, and one of the things that we know is doing resistance training, combining it with creatine And you know, I love me some creatine. I use Creatine HCL. I made a formula called ShiAtene. That's creatine HCL, which is 7 times more bioavailable than monohydrate, plus taurine and magnesium, kind of the trifecta for great ATP production, great workout performance and recovery, actually great daily performance. But it turns out creatine can also help with skin as well. So you might see a little bit, but, but I gotta be honest, it's not going to be like, wow, I had all this loose skin and now it's all tightened up. There's only so much you can do. I would do everything you can., and when you have more muscle, it might fill in a little things a little bit, but you might have to go get laser to help with that. So how much muscle do you need to put on your body to see noticeable fat loss? The question really is, is there an optimal muscle to fat ratio to see visible fat loss? I think that really what we need to look at is where do you really want your body fat to be? And this is why I want you to ditch the regular bathroom scale and upgrade your scale to a bioimpedance scale that will tell you your fat-free mass index and your fat fat mass index. Now, these, by the way, are never going to be as accurate as going to get a DEXA, which won't be as accurate as getting an MRI, but we got to start somewhere. I'd love to see you get a DEXA 1 to 2 times a year and then take it home and compare it to your bioimpedance and use that as your daily check-in. And what I have people do with a bioimpedance machine is get on the same time every morning, get up, go to the bathroom, walk around, get on your scale. And what's nice is these scales have a Bluetooth function, they'll go to your phone. Really, you're only paying attention to it once a week. You're weighing in daily, focusing on once a week, because what you want to see is that you are improving, changing your body composition and building muscle. It's a little bit like watching grass grow. You are not going to say, you know, I'd love to build some muscle and have some natural liposuction, I'm going to get on it, and think that in a week you're going to put 5 pounds of muscle on. No, that's going to take you months. So it's a slow, slow grind, literally. So this is where a bioimpedance machine can be great because what you're gonna start to see are shifts in your body composition. You might put on a pound of muscle, lose a pound of fat and go, nothing happened, but you'll see it on the scale. And what you're looking for is those bioimpedance scales look at something called total body water. And from that, they're extrapolating your fat-free mass and predicting skeletal muscle mass. 'Cause really what's gonna probably change the most as you start to do more working out is that your skeletal muscle mass is what you can impact the most. So what do we want to do? Well, women have 10 to 15% essential fat. That's fat we need to have on our body to survive. By the way, men, 3 to 5%. So we have less muscle mass, more body fat to begin with. Athletic women, you know, and a healthy, lean, fit woman, it's somewhere like 18 to 25%, and it really depends on your genetics, where you feel comfortable, what type of body type you have. I'm a way leaner person, always have been. That's where I feel my best, and that's where I'm my healthiest. So you've got to find what your N of 1 is best for you, but somewhere probably is 18 to 25%. If you were super athletic, it may be less than that. It might be 15 to 20%. Find what's best for you. But I really believe that as we're starting to change our body composition— notice I did not say lose weight— I would focus on building muscle first. When I graduate— actually, this was in doctoral school. They know this was in grad school. They taught us, do not lift weights till you lose the weight. That's actually the worst thing ever. You actually should start to focus on lifting weights to help you ensure that you lose fat while holding on to or building muscle. Then you really change that body composition and make all the difference. You go on a big fast weight loss diet, you're going to end up looking even worse. You'll still have the fluffy fat, you'll have the loose skin, And then you won't have the muscle holding it in tight. No bueno. So I would say really what you want to do, this is where BMI, I think, is kind of silly, but BMI can come into play. What you want to look at is if you're in the normal range for BMI, next thing you want to look at is, okay, if my normal range, if I've got a normal range of BMI, but my body fat's high, that means my skeletal muscle mass is low. What do I need to put on in terms of skeletal muscle mass to get into the top 25th percentile for my age? In terms of fat-free mass or appendicular skeletal muscle index. That's what you want to do. And as you're doing this, remember, if you focus on what you need to do to build muscle, which we're going to talk about, it's going to help you lose fat over time. Again, changing your body composition is a little bit like watching grass grow, but when you do this correctly, it's going to stick as opposed to trying to do this quickly, which never works. If you're one of those people that tends to have more visceral adipose tissue, you're kind of the apple. Remember the days of apples and pears? Kind of everyone's more of an apple nowadays, more because of cortisol issues, insulin issues, estrogen going down. So you might see if you're perimenopausal, menopausal, that your body composition's changed. The where your fat is has changed as you've gotten more belly fat, more visceral adipose tissue, and maybe your arms and legs have gotten a little bit thinner. It's worse for you to have that visceral adipose tissue, but it tends to be actually easier fat to lose than, say, the fat on your thighs. You probably noticed this. I didn't need to tell you, did I? Um, and some of the things can really help here are high-intensity interval training, big fan of high-intensity interval training, by the way. And of course, some low-caloric restriction, thinking of losing about 0.5% to 1% of your body weight a week, because then you can really help make sure that that is from fat, not from that beautiful Spanx muscle. While there is no way to target specific areas for fat loss, you can build muscle in specific areas that's going to help you tone that area, hold everything in tighter. So even if you do have fat there, it's going to look a lot better. Right? It's going to look way, way better. Now, I do have a cheat sheet that I'm going to share with you at the end of this video as well that's going to help you get started on a resistance training routine. So if you're listening to all this going, I have no idea where to start, JJ, oops, I forgot to work out, I got you covered. Just hang with me till the end and I'll share that with you. Next up, why is strength training crucial for women over 40 in terms of fat burning? How does strength training impact the hormonal shifts that happen to women over 40? Let's break down what happens. You've already You start to lose muscle around age 30. You lose muscle, you lose strength, you lose power. It doubles, by the way, around age 60. And a lot of that is because of the hormonal shifts that start to happen in our 40s. Sometime in your 40s, you're going to start going into perimenopause. Buckle up. So what happens during this time? Progesterone starts to decline. Your sleep starts to go wonky. So you'll notice with progesterone, all of a sudden you're like anxious and your sleep sucks. Your estrogen starts to go down. You start to feel like you can't recover from a workout, you have hot flashes, maybe you're not, um, able to build muscle like you used to, you can't focus, think straight. Estrogen— I know we always think of this in terms of testosterone, but estrogen actually is mission critical for women to help them burn fat and put on muscle. And as estrogen goes down, cortisol can come up, and you can become insulin resistant and have chronic inflammation as well. So you'll see a couple things if you're monitoring on labs. All of a sudden, fasting insulin that was always nice and low is jumping up, blood sugar is creeping up. You're starting to have these cortisol issues where maybe you're tired and wired and you can't fall asleep. You're starting to put on visceral adipose tissue where you never had an issue with it before. It's like your weight may not change that much, but, but where it is and what's going on with it, like your clothes just don't fit the way they used to. My mom called it shifting sands. All I know is I kept looking at that going, this is not happening to me. Because for her, shifting sands basically meant the fat in your butt went to the fat in your gut. I'm like, oh no. So, but you can counteract it, and strength training is great for that because you need to have this stimulus of lifting heavy things to help to counteract estrogen going down, testosterone going down, the inflammation. Remember, muscle contractions can help reduce inflammation as well and help improve insulin sensitivity. So muscle can help counteract a lot of these things. And as we age, your metabolism's slowing down, yes, but the big slowdown tends to happen around 60. I think it's really the cumulative loss of muscle. We also, during this time, become more insulin resistant, which then makes it harder for you to, to burn off fat and better at storing it, which is not what you want to do. And of course, muscle is the fastest way we can start to restore this insulin sensitivity and maintain our metabolism. Again, we got a couple things going on. Slight metabolic decline, it really hits 60, but the bigger thing is those hormonal shifts changing how we store fat and how we're able to build muscle. And that means you really need to focus on strength training. Cardio alone is not going to cut it. In fact, doing a lot of chronic cardio— I'm not talking about doing some high-intensity interval training. I love this for you because it teaches your body how to handle stress better and recover. I'm talking if you're doing more like, I'm going to go out and do an hour run or train for a marathon, these things that are more like 80%, 70 to 80% of your max heart rate for extended period of time. This can just give you another hit to your cortisol. First of all, it's going to break you down more than it builds you up. It's going to create more oxidative stress, more stress on your body, and you're not building muscle. So that's not really the prescription we have to look at for women over 40. Now, Strength training over 40, can it help preserve bone density in women while burning fat? I don't think of resistance training again. I think of the effects of resistance training, the effects of building muscle, making you better at burning fat. But one of the things that really resistance training can be super for is helping with bone mineral density. In a perfect world, boy, are we far from that at the moment, but in a perfect world, you would get a bone mineral density test in your teens. When you're building a lot of bone in your early 20s. Right now, the— I think the recommendation's like in your 60s when the eggs have been scrambled. So you really want to do a bone mineral density test. You get that done as you do a DEXA. You do a DEXA, you find out your bone mineral density, your T and Z scores. You also find out your body fat and where that body fat's located, and you find out your skeletal muscle mass. It's such a great test and not expensive. So like if they're going, we aren't going to cover this with insurance because you're not 65, It's like $100. It's super duper worth it if you can pull it off. And what you're going to find is resistance training loads your spine, loads your hips. So important for bone mineral density. Now, there are other things that are super helpful as well, but strength training is one of the things that can really help with bone mineral density. And osteoporotic fractures are super common in women 50+. I think I read somewhere that it was like half the women over 50 would have some kind of an osteoporotic fracture, but that just seems ridiculously high. But just know wherever it is, it's not good. So this is one of the ways you can stop yourself from being a statistic. So let's talk about what the difference is between fat burning during cardio and muscle training. If you are doing slow cardio training, Here's the reality, and let's break down fat burning versus sugar burning during exercise and all day long. Our body is a hybrid. We're never exclusively burning fat or exclusively burning carbs unless we're doing this high-intensity, super short, like 30 seconds or less, all-out sprinting for your life training. And maybe while you're sleeping, you're using mainly, mainly fat. It's when you are at your lowest levels of activity, that's when you use more fat for fuel. Highest levels, you're going to use more carbs for And in fact, I argue that if you're going and doing high-intensity interval training or you're going and doing resistance training, you want to be burning a lot of sugar. You want to be depleting those glycogen stores in your muscles. Guess what? They'll soak up the carbs when you refuel them after. It's not the workout that you look at to lose body fat. What you're looking at from a workout is to build muscle, to become more insulin sensitive, and to have a better resting energy expenditure. And then to move more all throughout the day and do some little caloric restrictions so that your body has to go into your fat stores and use them for fuel. So that's what you want to do. Fat burning— you're going to get more from doing a big long walk than you are going to the gym and doing a super hard weight workout. But overall, you're going to get a better metabolic effect from doing the big hard weight workout than doing the long slow walk that your body doesn't have anything to do to recover from So think about strength training as what is going to help your body be a better fat burner over time. Okay. Now there's— this was, this was like one of those big myths when I was in school that if you did exercise, if you worked at least 30 minutes in your target heart rate zone, you would burn calories for a day afterwards. Gosh, I wish that was true. It is not true. If you do something like high-intensity interval training where you really bust it You may have a little afterburn afterwards. It's called repaying the energy debt. So you create this energy debt from the workout, maybe two, if you're doing supersetting resistance training program in a circuit, but it's probably maybe an hour. It's not long-term after that. It's not this big thing. It's more your body paying back that oxygen debt. Then we need to break down between cardio steady state and cardio HIIT. And what I'll tell you is this is how I think about exercise. I think of exercise more under the umbrella of activity, and I'm thinking this under the whole umbrella of metabolism. And with metabolism, what do we know? You have your resting energy expenditure, how many calories you'd burn at rest. That can really be affected by estrogen, thyroid, but the big one that we can affect it with is muscle. Then you have the thermic effect of food. More protein, bigger thermic effect of food. And then you have activity. And under activity, we have non-exercise activity thermogenesis. How much do you move all throughout the day? I decided this year that my floor— you really, 8,000 should be your floor minimally. That's where we really see the, the really great effects. But it was like 8,000 to 12,000 was this range. Of course, more is better as long as it's not displacing real exercise. But I decided last year I was like, okay, got my 8,000 every day. This year I raised my floor to 10,000. And this is important because quite often people will start working out hard and all of a sudden they're doing less throughout the day because they're tired. So I always want to make sure we have a foundation of activity and then we build upon it with exercise. So we have non-exercise activity thermogenesis. What is that? As literally parking farther away, taking the stairs, walking the dogs, anything that you can do. Stand instead of sit, walk instead of stand, anything you can do to move more. That's what this is. Then we have exercise, and exercise in terms of Cardio, there's that steady-state exercise. Now I think of things like going for a walk, etc., the things that really don't get you like breathy and in zone 2. I think of that just as non-exercise activity thermogenesis. We try to go for a walk after dinner most nights, my husband and I. That's our like evening thing. But there's also in cardio, there's two different ones. There's more of like a zone 2 where you're working out but you can talk So maybe you're going for a jog, you're breathy, but you can have a conversation versus high-intensity interval training. There are a variety of different ways to do this. The most common one is like 1 minute all out, 1 minute walk, 1 minute all out, 1 minute walk. And again, there's a variety of different ways, everything from Norwegian 4x4s to Tabata to the Wingate. There's a bunch of different ones, but basically with steady state, you are working hard consistently versus HIIT. You work hard, you recover, and it's really contrasting. Really hard, recover. Really hard, recover. And why I like HIIT so much is it raises something called lactate. Lactic acid is produced, breaks into lactate and hydrogen ions, and that lactate goes to your brain and your heart, makes new mitochondria. And that high-intensity stimulus also, for some reason, is really good at number one, training your, your nervous system how to handle stress better, but also helping you burn off visceral adipose tissue. Yay! In terms of if you want to be able to burn more fat, a lot of activity, make sure you keep that up as you're adding in the exercise, resistance training to add that muscle for metabolic spanx, and then HIIT training to attack the visceral adipose tissue, but also to help with VO2 max and that lactate. And what you can do if you're short on time is you can combine cardio and resistance training. People will still look at that going, okay, for fat burning, I really want you to think of fat burning. Are you trying to burn dietary fat or body fat? I think that you're probably trying to burn body fat, right? You will burn off excess body fat when you're in a little bit of a deficit as created by, by doing more activity or eating a little bit less. Like, we got to have a little bit of a deficit there to do that, right? But I do like combining resistance training and cardio. I actually do it as what I call high-intensity functional training. What this is is where you do, like, let's say you do air squats for a minute, and then you walk around easy for a minute. You do box jumps for 30 seconds, then you walk it off for 30 seconds. So you see what I mean? You're doing like functional hard stuff, and then you combine it with something easy. Could just be easy walking, easy lunging, easy step-ups that are low, low ones, that type of thing. So easy peasy peasy. Bottom line with all of this stuff is muscle Is like nature's liposuction. It holds everything in tighter and boosts your metabolism. Now, I said earlier that I have a cheat sheet for you. I added it into the description below, and I've also added a video here on the screen that I think you are going to love. And do not forget to hit the notification bell so you don't miss it.