Overcoming Menopause & Stress Struggles, Doing ‘the Virgin Diet’ as a Vegetarian, & How to Lose Body Fat

Hey, it's J.J. here.

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Each week I answer big questions directly.

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Joyce from Facebook writes in. I am a huge fan of JJ Virgin since watching her on public television in 2016, I ordered the Virgin diet and immediately started following it and felt wonderful. 30 pounds just melted off. Size 12 to a size 6. My stomach didn't hurt for the first time in years. Three years ago. And here we go. I started menopause with no change in my diet. I'm still gluten free, corn free, soy free, peanut free, sugar free and dairy free, but a lot of COVID stress. I gained it all back. Now nothing seems to work. Now. Help. You know, I did another podcast with Dr. Suzanne Gilberg where we were lamenting about this and how they try to say in the studies menopause does nothing to change your metabolism. Like, are you kidding? The minute you start to have fluctuating hormones, a whole lot of stuff happens. So we're going to unpack this in two places because both you had the stress and menopause. And the first thing I'm going to say, Joyce, is like, I remember I went through menopause right when my son Grant was a victim of a hit and run. And I spent four and a half months in the hospital, literally where he was fighting for his life. And. And you want to have stress, like their stress. And then that threw off all my hormones. So you started menopause kind of right around Covid. So stress was compounded. I mean, stress can actually throw you into menopause or at the very least, dysregulate your estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. It can lower progesterone, lower testosterone, which is going to create problems as well. But stress on its own, what happens with stress? We start breaking down muscle. We elevate our blood sugar from the breaking down of muscle. Our gut gets more permeable. So thankfully, you've stuck on the Virgin diet because you have even more food intolerance. We start to have more cravings. Our sleep gets impaired. When our sleep gets impaired, we start to become more insulin resistant and leptin resistant. We get hungrier. We get better at storing fat, we get worse at burning it off. Does any of this sound familiar? I mean, and it's truly not fair. Then you've got menopause where now testosterone is starting to go down, which means it's harder for you to hold onto and build muscle. Estrogen starts to go down, and now it's harder for you to burn fat. Progesterone starts to go down now your sleep's impaired and you're not handling stress as well. So you can see all of this can have a dramatic impact on you. So what the heck do you do? You do. All right, let's walk through it. So number one, I'm glad you've remained off all those foods and I would just ask you to be hyper vigilant. There is to make sure that they are absolutely 100% out of your diet and that you're using enzymes. And I love my defends for this because it can break down those allergenic proteins so that you don't launch that hi fi response, you don't get inflamed. So that's the first one, number one. Number two, I want to make sure that you're using a scale, a bioimpedance scale so you can really monitor your body and what your weight is made up of. We look at losing weight, but the reality is for most of us it's not about losing weight. It's holding onto and building muscle while you're dropping body fat. The last thing you want to be is a skinny fat fat inside, thin outside, because that is super detrimental to your health. But also it means frailty later in life, which puts a huge risk for early morbidity for dying. So I want you to get a bioimpedance scale if you don't have it and get really used to measuring not just your weight, but what that weight's made of. Looking at your fat free mass versus your body fat and getting very clear by looking at what your ideal body weight should be as to how much body, how much fat free mass you can have. And a very simple equation is if you wanted to have your body fat be 20%, then that means 80% of your body should be the fat free mass. If you want your body fat at 25%, that means 75% of your body should be fat free mass. So find that number and see if you need to increase your muscle the next thing. And if you need to increase your muscle, we're now going to dose your diet where you're getting a gram of protein per pound of your ideal body weight. So let's figure out your ideal body weight by looking at your height and your frame size.

Right?

And then we're going to take that number, we're going to multiply it. If you want your body fat to be 20%, we're going to multiply it by 0.8 to know what Your fat free mass should be. We're going to monitor that number. We're going to focus on getting that number to where it wants it needs to be most important. Then I want to make sure that you've managed the COVID stress. And most likely just like we take our body to the gym, we need to take our nervous system to the gym. And we've been through a lot of stress. And you don't just shake it off. Like if you look at an animal when they're under a lot of stress, they just go shake it off and then walk out of it. Right? We need to do that, but we don't. I have been now working with Dr. Joe Dispenza for 18 months, both at his retreats and every day doing meditations to get my nervous system back together again after some of the trauma I've been through. And I'm going to put in the show notes both Dr. Amy Pigian, the podcast we did about trauma, and also Dr. Joe Dispenza's meditations and how you can get access to those because that can be truly helpful. So stress, of course, is a big one. And then sleep, confirm that you're sleeping well, right? Or a ring muse, whatever you want to use as your tracking device to confirm that you're getting your quality Sleep deep and REM every single night. Because so much menopause and stress can really impact sleep. And if it is, I highly recommend sleep candy and my magnesium Body Calm. I use them every single night. And what I've been doing lately is doing a hot sauna. You could do the same thing with a hot Epsom salts bath. And then my room is down between 66 and 68 and pitch back, black room, no noise, go to sleep. Really good covers too. So that's what you want to do for sleep. Super important to get sleep dialed in. Next up, work with a really great doctor. This is so important to make sure that your hormones are balanced and then you can make the decision on whether you should do hormone replacement therapy or for full disclosure. And the first thing you want to check is that your thyroid's working optimally. We've done a couple great podcasts recently on thyroid function. Look up Dr. Amy Horneman and of course, Dr. Alan Christiansen. But if your thyroid's not working well, you will not be able to lose weight, you won't be able to build muscle, and you won't be able to balance your hormones. So and by the way, you can be hypothyroid, which is mildly elevated tsh nowhere near out of range. Like I was hypothyroid at 1.5 to 2 on my thyroid. Even, even like. And it depends on what your free T3 is. So you got to check your thyroid and make sure that that is working well. Stress can of course impact thyroid function. And then look at your hormones because, and I'm, I will tell you full disclosure. I take thyroid, WP thyroid through Dr. Alan Christensen and I use an estrogen patch, an estradiol patch. I cycle progesterone half the month and I do a testosterone shot every two weeks. I am a big believer in hormone replacement therapy because. And you always have to, this has to be individualized and you have to work with a doctor based on your situation. But when you really look at the number one killer of women, 50% or more of women die of heart disease and when estrogen goes down, all the cardiovascular risk factors go up. So I'm a huge fan of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. I've been on it since this all started. Since my hormones started going wonky. I've been on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and I'm protecting my bones, my brains and my heart because it's also low estrogen linked with dementia as well. That's another one. It's also a great time to do a DEXA body scan. You'll also see your fat free mass and fat mass there. But you'll also get to see your bone density which is so your bone mineral density is so important. And I see the recommendations for when we should do that. I'm going we really should do at age 20, maybe age 15 when we can actually impact it more. But it's definitely a number you want to know. The other thing that can be super helpful here is wearing a continuous glucose monitor and I do these periodically. Play around with it because I've got mine pretty well balanced. But then I spot check every couple months. But a continuous glucose monitor and we'll put this in the show notes I use Nutrisense can be amazing for really giving you real time data as to what you're doing and if it's working right. Like how is your diet working? Are you doing things that are hijacking your blood sugar? How balanced are you? And this is important because if your average fasting levels are higher, it is a 5x increase in dementia depending on the numbers and it doesn't have to be much like 90 to 100. It's small. So it's something we really do need to be aware of and need to watch and then finally exercise. So I will tell you, I'm working on my next book that will be out in 2026. I have a book coming out, 2024, I'm super excited about, but I'm literally working on the 2026 now. So you're going to be hearing all about it as I dig through it. And it's really all about protein, muscle mass, metabolism and how to play full out at 100. And so one of the key things here is that, and it was funny, this is, I feel like I've gone full circle from when I very first started in the field and everyone was doing and loads of long distance cardio and I was like, lift weights, lift them heavy, don't lift those little pink ones. And that's where I'm back to. And especially for women, 40s, 50s, 60s, you want to make sure that you are building muscle, building muscle because you want to have that muscle and the bone mineral density improvements that come with it to take you through your 70s, 80s, 90s, hundreds. So you have better balance. You won't stop, by the way. You're going to keep going, but these are the times we can start to really make an impact. So make sure that you're doing your resistance training, some high intensity interval training for the growth hormone. Right. Of course, some basic cardio for your heart, you know, and, and then some yoga for some of that stress reduction and mindfulness. Okay, long winded answer. But this was quite a, quite an important question. And Joyce, I would love, love, love to hear what happens to you when you put this into place. If you have any questions again, jjvirgin.com questions and then I've got the next one ready. This is from Jenny on Instagram who says, I'm mostly vegetarian, but I want to try doing the elimination thing again. Perimenopause is killing me. So what can I eat if I can't eat dairy and egg and soy and gluten for protein? And here's the deal, like when you are a vegetarian, you are so much more likely to have food intolerances because of your reliance on these foods over and over and over again in your diet. When you really look at diets, what you really want to be doing is having a really good rotation, right? You want to eat as local as possible, organic as possible, as seasonal as possible, and rotate your foods. And so when you're a vegetarian, you've just limited things way down. Now I just talked about the importance of protein and we really want to make sure that if she's trying to get through this again, for someone trying to lose weight, the minimum here would really be like three fourths of a gram per pound of body weight. So what is she going to do when she can't eat dairy and egg and soy and gluten? Now she says, I'm mostly vegetarian, so I'm not quite sure what that means. And so what I would say here first is if you are able to incorporate in pastured chicken or wild fish, it's going to be so much easier for you. The protein quality is so much higher and it's just going to be easier. If not, there's really no way to do this without using protein powders. And you're going to need to rely a lot on my plant based protein shakes because that's how you'll be able to get the protein levels up high enough. Now I'm really glad that you're doing the elimination plan. So the virgin diet is a modified elimination diet based on the foods that I saw most often when I was doing food sensitivity testing with doctors. And the foods I saw most often that your body was reacting to due to a phenomenon called leaky gut and leaky guts, where your small intestine becomes more permeable. And it becomes more permeable due to stress due to fructose intake, which you're getting in high fructose corn syrup, you're getting an apple juice concentrate, you're getting an agave on down the line, honey, et cetera. And it happens from gluten. Gluten triggers the release of a protein called zonulin, which makes your gut more permeable. Glyphosate also can damage the gut and lead to problems. And pain medications do it too. So food intolerances can happen anytime. Super common. And if you're eating foods that your body is reactive to, is intolerant to, creates inflammation, can cause weight gain, besides headaches, joint pain, autoimmune disease, gas and bloating, fatigue, skin rashes, blah, blah, blah. Nothing good. I can't say, hey, you've got food intolerances, this awesome thing will happen to you. No, there is no awesome here. So basically I have you pull out the most common food intolerances. Gluten, dairy, eggs, corn, soy, peanuts. And then of course, we really pull added sugars and artificial sweeteners out because there's no place for them in a healthy diet. Sorry, no place. And then we do that for at least three weeks to cleanse your body and give it a Time for the, the antibodies that your body kicks up in response to these food particles coming out gives your body chance to calm down and reset and you start to feel what feeling good really feels like. Then you go back and you would challenge to see which foods work for you and which foods don't. So in order to do this as a vegan or vegetarian, I do have these plans in the Virgin Diet cookbook so you can get access to some of these vegan recipes. And I have vegan recipes on my website too in vegetarian. But I will tell you that you are going to want to use protein powder and the easiest thing would be to do your first and last meal to do them as a loaded protein smoothie because you'll be able to get the, the protein you need. And if you're willing to add collagen because it's not vegan, that would make it even easier to get there. So if we could use a plant based protein powder plus collagen plus good karma flax milk, we could get you right there to about 40 grams of protein morning and evening. And then you can make sure that your lunch, you have like nuts and seeds and some lentils or legumes. The biggest challenge that we have, of course, as you know with a vegetarian protein is it's not the quality and the efficiency ratio. It's not absorbed and bioavailable like animal protein is, doesn't have the balance of branched chains like, like animal protein has. And you don't absorb all the protein and the protein that listed. So it might say there's 4 grams of protein but you're only getting 2. So that's why you have to focus on making sure that you're adding in. You're going to have to supplement with some protein powder. All right, there you go. And then as far as the rest of stuff for perimenopause, again refer to the one I just recorded because that'll help you too, Jenny. Okay, what shall we answer next? Let's do this one because this really has to do with, this is a big menopause one too. And this is if I want to lose weight, specifically belly fat fast, where should I start? So this is an interesting question because one of the things we know is, is that you can't lose belly fat. Like you can't lose fat preferentially. And, and I think the real answer there was you can't spot, reduce, you can't like, if you want to burn off fat on your thighs, you can't just burn off fat on Your thighs. However, belly fat is different than that because belly fat, when we really look at belly fat, we're really talking about either Android fat or visceral fat. And this is fat in your truncal area that tends to be more around your organs. And it's actually a very different type of F than the other, the fat on your thighs, et cetera. And this fat tends to be driven more by two hormones, cortisol and insulin. So the reason that's important is we can impact that more because of it. So even though you can't spot reduce, we may be able to turn the focus onto this visceral adiposity by really looking at a couple things that can help dramatically with lowering cortisol, which and lowering insulin. First one is when insulin's high, you're breaking down muscle, you're raising blood sugar, and you're telling your body to store fat around your belly. What do we know that we can do to lower cortisol? Well, tapping and shout out to my buddy Nick Ortner tapping solution. We'll put this in the show notes. Tapping has been shown or emotional freedom technique to lower cortisol like 27%. I don't really know any drug that could do this kind of thing. I mean, that's crazy. Now I don't know on regular meditation because I just don't think it's been studied on that. I would imagine that you get something similar. But tapping we know does that so highly. Recommend tapping. High intensity interval training helps your sympathetic nervous system learn how to handle stress better. So that can be helpful too. Vitamin C is super helpful for lowering cortisol as well. I have this sparkling sea powder I'm addicted to in the Reignite wellness line, so you can try that. So those are a couple things that you can do to help. And then look at what's my source of stress? What is making me do this? Am I making myself do this because of just my, you know, go, go, go feeling like the lion's chasing me. And if so, I'm going to highly recommend. And if I can do this, anybody can, considering I was like the most stressed human is, is starting your day off with a little meditation and then potentially doing a meditation break some point through the day. So I start my day with my buddy, Dr. Joe Dispen Morning, get up, start my meditation and my two dogs do it with me too. The two dogs, hubbies, the hubs. We all meditate in the morning and then if I need a little bit of a reset during the day, then he's got these 15 minutes that I will do. But I found the better I get at the morning, the less I need the reset. In fact, funny story, my whole team got together and they go, you know, JJ, we've been watching you for the 18 months you've been doing meditation. And we just want to tell you, don't stop. It's like, okay, so cortisol. Now, what about on the insulin side? Well, of course, the insulin side is all about really getting your blood sugar in check. Of course, you've heard me talk about eating by the plate. Protein, fat, and fiber. Besides the satiety that that does, the big thing it does is help with blood sugar balance. So that's important. One of the things you can do to check that to make sure you're really nailing it, is to wear a continuous glucose monitor. I'll put nutrients in the show notes, how to get it, because that's the one that I use. And I think, you know, this isn't something that you might need. You need to wear for a year unless you're really struggling. But a month or two of wearing a continuous glucose monitor can be so enlightening as to what's going on, what impacts you, you know, what's going on with coffee, what's going on with. When you get stressed out, what's going on if you, like, eat. Like, for me, the only time I really see anything hijack on my blood sugar now, I noticed it when I was traveling was I was a little piggy with a big, big bo of kiwi fruit, and I was like, knock it off. But I've really learned with the CGM how to have super balanced blood sugar. So a CGM can be great. And then what else do we know? You walk after meal can help lower the blood sugar response to meals. Some lemon juice before the meal, besides taking your sweet tooth away, can lower the blood sugar. Same with vinegar. Vinegar, especially apple cider vinegar, can act like metformin to improve insulin sensitivity. And then one other thing, and I know you are not going to like me for saying this, but that fat that you have, that visceral fat, the other thing I'm going to highly recommend is going and getting into a cold plunge. Now, if you don't have a cold plunge, we finally splurged on one of these things. And I'll put this in the show notes, too. It wasn't as expensive as I thought it was going to be, and it actually looks really pretty outside. It's become quite a party thing. Like people come to my house and they want to cold plunge, and it's really fun to have one person the cold plunge. And we all cheer them on. So cold plunges are going to be somewhere between like 45 and 50 degrees. You stay in them. We're still trying to figure out what's the sweet spot of time and temperature. But when you get into the cold plunge, it browns your white fat. So what that means is your brown fat is your more metabolically high mitochondria easier to burn off fat. It's not the dangerous fat. So it basically helps move that white fat, the bad fat, into brown fat. So it's very active, energetic, and you can burn it off, which is what we want to do, right? All right. Now again, if you've got questions, hit me up jjvirgin.com questions. See you next time. This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I answer your questions weekly. Plus I interview the top experts in health and wellness. So make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com yep, it's that easy. I'll see you next time.

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