Putting It All Together: Your Metabolism Makeover Game Plan

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Wow, I am clearing the rest of the day. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers Now available on Disney+. Rated PG. We've uncovered the real secrets to breaking through weight loss resistance after 40, how to have a muscle-first metabolism, how to eat to fuel your body, exercise smarter, and of course, the behind-the-scenes factors that could be messing everything up. Things like poor sleep, stress, and hormonal imbalances. But now comes the most important part. How do you actually put this into practice without feeling completely overwhelmed? And this is like this full-time job. So today I'm gonna walk you through a simple blueprint that's gonna tie everything together into a plan you can actually follow starting today, not tomorrow, right? By the end of this episode, you're gonna have a clear game plan for building a stronger metabolism, balancing your hormones, and finally losing fat in a sustainable way. So let's get to it. Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, mom— turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. Want an ad-free experience? You can now subscribe to my exclusive VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. It's like your daily latte, but better for your health. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom. So I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review. Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My virtual JJ Virgin will reply directly. And trust me, This will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.

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First of all, let's talk about the core formula, and that is eating by the plate and the clock. When I say eat by the plate, here's what I want you to do. Number 1, eat your protein first, then you do your non-starchy vegetables, and then add in healthy fats and slow low carbs. And really, how much of those depends on what feels best for you. I always start with the protein, and I do that based on your target body weight, where you wanna be, 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of your target body weight, which will be somewhere between probably 30 to 50 grams per meal, right? And your bare minimum being 100 grams per day. That's what's super important. How do you know that you're doing this? You gotta track. Use the Cronometer app, use a food scale. Do not eyeball it. That don't work. Next after that, you're gonna add in non-starchy vegetables. Think deep leafy greens, Broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, onions, right? All different colors. This is super duper important. And then in terms of healthy fats, what I like to do first is go, okay, what did I get from my protein? 'Cause if I had some wild fish, some grass-fed beef, I was getting it in there. And then what whole fats can I have first? So would that be avocados, nuts, and seeds? And then what am I using in my cooking or dressings? Things like extra virgin olive oil, maybe ghee, coconut. And so that's what I do first, and I see where I'm at. I've really started to pay attention because fat adds up fast, especially when you're tracking this. You're like, holy smokes, what did I just do? And then I'm going to play around with, do I want to have more carbs? And I love what Dr. Donald Layman talks about. He goes, really what you want to do is fuel your carbs for what your muscles need. Big hard workout day, I might up my carbs a little bit. A day that where I'm not working as much, not moving as much, I might keep it down to more of the non-starchy vegetables and a little bit of fruit. I generally have 2 servings of berries every day and I have a lot of non-starchy vegetables. And then I'll decide if I'm going to have things like some lentils or some Japanese purple sweet potato. I'm kind of hooked on that. But again, balance it out. If you're going to eat more carbs, eat less fat. If you're going to eat more fat, eat less carbs. Right? You don't eat high carb, high fat. Fortunately, that dietary approach is really the ultra-processed food approach, which is not what we're doing anyway. So I said eat by the plate. That's the plate. I love that because that protein, fiber, and fat trifecta is really good for blood sugar balance and satiety. And then you're gonna eat by the clock. And I want you to think of eating between an hour and 3 hours after waking up in the morning. Why am I having you do that? Because I want your pancreas to have time to get online and be ready to secrete insulin in response to what you are eating. And then stop eating 2 to 4 hours before bed. There is a caveat there. And then eat every, you know, 3 to 5 hours. It's probably gonna be more like 4 to 5. Try not to snack, eat, right? Much better. So we're gonna have, you know, wake up in the morning, maybe you woke up at 6, have breakfast at 8, and then have lunch around 12 or 1. And then have dinner around 6. Now, what you might find is that you are trying to compress that feeding window. You might find that you want to eat within 9 hours or 8 hours, right? So whatever you find works best for you, somewhere between 2 and 4 meals to get there. And again, with really getting enough protein in being super important for that. So find what works best for you. I used to say, "Do not eat before bed," and I still think that's probably the best for all of us. However, if you're super hungry before bed, bed and you didn't get your protein in, you can have a little protein-only bolus before bed and it's not going to hijack anything. Uh, might impact you a little bit, but unlikely. So if you find that you're really hungry and you need a little protein before bed, like sometimes when I'm traveling and I haven't gotten the food in, I will add in a little protein before bed. That's where I'm traveling, those like Paleo Valley meat sticks can come in handy. But bottom line, protein plus fiber plus healthy fat. Those are those plates, whether it's a smaller plate, bigger plate, that's what you always wanna do for that blood sugar balance and satiety. And then eat within an 8 to 12 hour window. 12 is your absolute max. And generally I found most of us do best in the 10 to 12 hours, hour to 3 hours after you wake up, stop eating 2 to 4 hours before bed. So that's your fuel. Now let's talk weekly movement. Every day I want you to move more, right? Get that NEAT in. Get at least 8,000 steps daily. And more is better. And bonus points if you wanna throw on a weight vest just to help you burn more calories. You moving more, fidgeting, everything else can add up to another 800 to 2,000 calories a day. It's huge. Then I want you to do that resistance training and I want you to get in minimally 2 times a week for each body part, push, pull, hip and thigh hinging, up to 3 times a week. Now you could do that where you're splitting the routine, so you're doing 4 days or 4, 6 days a week of resistance training, but you're hitting each body part 2 to 3 times a week. So upper body pushing, upper body pulling, and hip and thigh. Why? Because I want you to build more muscle to boost that metabolism, improve your bones, and improve your insulin sensitivity. And remember, you're working in that range of probably somewhere in the 6 to 15 rep range, multiple sets, so that you're building muscle in there. The lower rep range is going to build you more strength. But if you don't feel comfortable doing really heavy, then go to the little higher rep range. The other thing that I want you to do is some HIIT training 2 days a week. HIIT training is that high-intensity interval training where you go all out, then recover, all out, then recover. And I want you to do that. It's only 2 days a week. When people tell me, I'm doing HIIT every day, I'm like, no, you're not. If you're really doing HIIT correctly, you can't. There's a couple different ways to do it. You could do a 1-to-1, which is is, you know, 30 to 60-second increments of hard followed by the same amount of time of easy. That's kind of my go-to one. Today I did the Wingate one, which is 30 seconds all out and then 3.5 minutes to recover. I'm doing that 4 times. There's also Tabata ones where you do 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds recover. Or there is the Norwegian 4x4, named for the Norwegian cross-country team, where you do 4 minutes of hard 3 minutes active recovery. Again, if you're doing this correctly, you cannot do it every day because it's taxing you. So I think an easy thing to do here is go, you know what? I'm going to do resistance training, full body, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I'll do HIIT training, maybe Tuesday, Thursday, and then restorative yoga on Saturday and a long zone 2-y type of thing on Sunday. And zone 2 again is where you can work out and you sound breathy and sexy, but it's, it's, that's the zone that you're in is that zone. It's not hard where you can't talk. You can still carry on a conversation, but it's a little challenging. So that's how I would put all of that together. The priority is NEAT, then resistance training, then HIIT training. And then bonus points if we can throw in that yoga and that zone 2. I think those are also very important. Now I'm putting mobility work in throughout as I do my warmups, my resistance training by doing more full range and standing types of resistance training. But I love the focused mobility of yoga because it also makes me work in all of the different planes too. I also love like yoga just because it, even though it's work, it feels like I'm moving things through and it's helping me recover better as well. So every day I want you to think, what am I going to do today to move, right? So you're moving on a regular basis, but you're doing all sorts of different things so that it's helping your body avoid injury, cross-train, and continue to progress. Pillar 3, is recovery. And so recovery, one of the key things with recovery is sleep. Of course, that's the most important of all. 7 to 9 hours a night. This is what you have to make a priority. So shut those screens off, make sure that you've set that time out for sleep, have your evening routine dialed wherever you are. I travel all the time. I got an evening routine. It goes with me wherever I am. If you are a slow caffeine metabolizer, you might have to shut the coffee off in the morning. If you're like me, I'm a fast caffeine metabolizer, it's stops about midday, and then just get yourself dialed in. Have dinner 2 to 4 hours before bed, and away we go. Because that sleep is going to help you a lot with also your adrenal health and stress. And along with stress, just build in those routines. It might be meditation, breathwork, fun— that's going to help you with your cortisol balance. Because chronically driving it, chronic stress that's elevating your cortisol, is going to break down muscle and make you store more fat around your waist, and It also can lead to that leaky gut and inflammatory stuff that I talked about in episode 4. You can't steal from sleep and you can't drive too hard and build a lot of stress and be metabolically healthy. And then of course hormones. And this is where if you've got issues going on with thyroid or you're in that perimenopause and menopause transition, uh, seek out a hormone doc who knows about optimizing your hormones to get some help there and get yourself tested, really dig into the thyroid side of things. And of course, get yourself with a doctor who knows how to do all this stuff because hormones, getting your hormones dialed in can change everything. And so you owe it to yourself to check in and learn about them and see if they're right for you. This is really the time to focus on you. And of course, invest in your health so that you can step into your 50s and beyond being your strongest years. And they can be. We talked about some of the different things that can cause weight loss resistance. Like gut health. You can check to see if you have food intolerances. You can do the Virgin Diet to check that out. You can do a gut test to see what's going on with your microbiome, because that can cause a lot of issues. You can also do a test to see if you've got any kind of toxic overload. But here's the reality: if you're living in this world, you're getting exposed to toxins all the time. So I cannot do a big enough shout out for sauna. We'll put some of our great sauna resources in the show notes. I'm in my sunlight and sauna when I'm home every single day. When I'm on the road, I try Take a hot bath to do it because we've gotta be doing things to get rid of those toxins on a regular basis. Sauna is fabulous for that. So is fiber, so is sweat, and so is drinking a lot of pure water to help you flush all this stuff out. And I know I just threw a bunch at you, so don't try to do all of it at once. That will just raise your cortisol. Let's just pick one that you go, you're like, I've talked about all of these things and go, okay, what's the most important thing? Is it eating protein first right now? Is it getting my NEAT up? What's the most important thing? And then make sure that you are measuring all of this because in order for you to see these shifts, you gotta be measuring. And so how do we do that? Well, of course, the bioimpedance scale so we can see what's going on with your fat-free mass and your fat mass. Using an Oura Ring or some tracking device so we can see what's going on with your NEAT and your HRV and your sleep. Using a chronometer app so we can see, really do that macro audit and see what's going on with your food. And then also just checking in with you and going, how do I feel, man? Like, how's my energy? How's my focus? How's my mood, right? That's because ultimately, isn't that what really, really matters? How you feel. So checking in with that as well. But what you measure and monitor, as you know, you can improve. And again, I would really start with one thing and focus. It took me a year to really focus and get the meditation and stress stuff dialed in. That was like my, my kryptonite. So be kind to yourself. Pick the thing that you really need to focus on first. Pick the one that's a big rock that when you fix that one, it's going to have big impact. And again, that might be eating protein first. That might be just simply adding the NEAT in, making sure your steps are there. It might be resistance training or HIIT, whatever it is, or sleep. Pick one. And I got to just remind you again, don't do it alone. It's not fun. Lean on into the community. Join the Facebook group, JJ Virgin Lifestyle Community. We are here. To help you. I've got coaches in there. I've got my clone too. So we gotcha. We got you covered. And you've got the game plan. Now remember, when you eat by the plate and you eat by the clock and you move your body daily, you build muscle, you recover and sleep well and deal with the stress, you figure out the things going on with your hormones and your gut and toxins. All of a sudden you're going to go, wow, my metabolism is working. For me. I don't feel like I'm like trying to push a snowball up a hill. But again, that was a lot of stuff. Pick one, one change at a time, and you're just going to habit stack all those wins and they're just going to start to carry you forward. It's just progress over perfection. It's being consistent. That's what changes the game. And remember, you have to get healthy to lose weight. You don't lose weight to get healthy. So you got to put the health first. When you do that, fat loss follows and fat loss lasts. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Would you prefer an ad-free experience? Join my VIP podcast at subscribetojj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a to unlock uninterrupted, ad-free access to all the episodes and insights you love. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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