Reset Your Energy, Mind, and Body with Chalene Johnson

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry, mom turned four time New York Times Best Selling authority. 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. This is going to be super fun.

Today.

I have my buddy Chalene Johnson with me. I'm in Miami right now and she just moved there and I'm like, oh my gosh, we're going to be in town, let's get together. So we just had a fun day of creating content and I was super excited to do this because I've been watching Chalene's Instagram channel and her YouTube channel and just going, wow, I love the direction of your content. Because everything she's doing right now is to help women 40 plus with all of their shifting needs. And what's really, really interesting is you may know her from infomercials. She's actually sold more exercise videos, has a Guinness Book of World Records for it than anyone else. She stepped away from that years ago when she realized that she just had this epiphany that what she was doing wasn't healthy for herself and she didn't feel right sharing that anymore with the millions of women who trust her. So she took some time, took a break to really kind of recalibrate and go, what do I need now? As a, you know 40 plus year old woman. What does my audience need? You're going to hear her journey of how she dropped 10% body fat, the things that she used to do that she doesn't do anymore. More importantly, the things that she does do now that she didn't used to do. So super exciting. I talked a little bit about Instagram. She has over 90 million downloads on her two YouTube podcasts, the Celine show and the Build you'd Tribe show. Incredible. I would highly recommend it. We'll it put in the show notes, the links to her Instagram and the links to her YouTube. They are such great resources. She's also a New York Times bestselling author and she's been all over the media. Abc, NBC, Good Morning America, Inside Edition, New York Post, Daily Mail of Orbs, the Kelly Ripa show, Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, hundreds of podcasts and Huffington Post even listed her as one of the 50 female entrepreneurs to watch. And again, what we're going to really be digging into is powerful aging. I just recently was like going, I am watching her showing what she's doing now at the gym, how she's transformed her body, how much healthier she feels. So it's like we're going to hear all of what she's doing and those secrets. So I will be back with Chalene. She's also giving you her free energy reset 14 day program and you can get that@jjvirgin.com shaleen and I'll be right back with Chalene, so stay with me. 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 interf on your laptop 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.

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I am so excited you're here. Thank you.

In the flesh.

How awesome. We're almost neighbors.

That's amazing.

So cool. Now when I think of you, like, I think of all of those fitness videos. Oh, my gosh. Like you have a, like, world record or something.

Yes, I'm in the Guinness Book of World Records for having done the most exercise videos.

So insane.

But what's insane about it is I couldn't get hired to teach a fitness class anywhere because I was so bad. I mean, they just told me, like, you need. You don't hear the beat. You've got a great personality, you're so bubbly, but you really don't hear the beat. I was a full time at that time, legal secretary, wanting to go to law school. And I'm just doing this as a hobby and I can't even get this, wow, hobby of a job. When is this? So 95. 90. No, this would be like 93. When I first moved to Southern California. Yeah. So, right. I was like, determined to get better at it. And I learned from all the great people on how to be a better instructor and how to hear the beat. And eventually I got teaching classes. Eventually. Here we are.

Yeah, but here we are. That you did all of those exercise videos and then you kind of stepped away from it.

Yeah.

Why?

I was standing on the set of an infomercial and I was reading the teleprompter after having been asked to get leaner so that I could be more marketable. And then to be asked to get smaller was embarrassing. It brought up all of my imposter syndrome stuff like, oh, they found you out. So when they asked me to lose weight, I did. I didn't even know how to diet. I was afraid of real food. And I started working out like four hours a day to get ready for that infomercial and eating very, very little. I'm standing on the set about to pass out. I've lost my muscle tone. Everyone however, saying, you look amazing. What are you doing? You never look better.

I'm like starving myself.

I'm like the confusion like you've never felt. I've never been more unhealthy. And I'm getting all this praise and now I'm looking into a camera and. And the line that I had to read was, and you can get these results too, in just 30 minutes a day and eating real food. And I remember thinking I just lied. And then I had to justify it in my head and say, well, maybe that's true for some people, it's not true for me and I need to be done. How did I get here? This is unhealthy for me. And so with the number one show on the air for my own health, mental and physical, I stepped away.

Wow.

Well, bravo for you because I think you're now really bringing a voice of reason.

Yeah.

Out there. And you know, this stuff has not been helpful. No. Stuff we grew up with. And we were just laughing offline about some things we're all part of.

Oh my God.

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

I have to make amends, you know, but you get so caught up in it. I think especially women of our age. Like there's so many of us that as teenagers we saw the Jane Fonda videos and the idea was to be perfect, to think of the movie Perfect.

And I was in LA at the time running an aerobic studio when Perfect came out. I can't imagine, like in all the rope studio, all the robots instructors became celebrities. Yes, yes.

And there was no strength training. We didn't know anything about nutrition then. And so the mindset, even as we start to learn new things, things I think a lot of us are still. It's there.

Well, we had. Back then, we had a place in LA called the Sweat Factory.

Oh yeah.

Literally they would mop up the floors. It was like hot yoga. Like that you see people mop up the floors. Except this was not a hot place. It was literally. You sweated so much because you were working so hard.

Yeah.

But I rebelled and started doing everything around resistance training because I realized that I couldn't get the results for people. People doing all that cardio. Cuz they were all women, 40 plus. And so I started doing loads of resistance training with people and lo and behold, they got tighter, firmer, like everything they wanted you know, they never got bigger.

Yeah.

Like, never in 40 years have I seen a woman lift weights and get bigger.

Yeah. Right.

So that was always my focus. And then flipping off of that silly carb thing, like, that was ridiculous.

Yeah.

Where you just can't stop thinking about food.

The hardest part for me, thinking back on it, is worrying the impact that I had on other women and also on my kids. So we've had a lot of open conversations about it on my podcast. And, you know, when you know better, you do better. And I think that's true for many of us. Good habits and bad habits. Too much of anything isn't good, and.

It takes something to hit you in the face and go, but wait a minute. This is not what I did. So you had this realization, and now you're. How old are you now?

55.

55.

I'm in the after party.

Don't you wish if someone had told me that things would be like this?

Now?

Let's just skip ahead.

Absolutely.

Blow through 35 to 50. Blow through that and jump over.

If you're following the right women, you realize there's so much to look forward to.

Yeah. And I have amazing female mentors that are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, which is super cool.

Yeah.

I remember being. We went to the Grammys a couple years ago, and it was when Dolly Parton was one of the hostesses. And I remember going, look at her. And Diana ross had her 70th birthday party there. And I'm like, these are okay. These are who I want to be. Like. And they're killing it. So here you are now. What's changed? What are you doing now? How are things different?

Yeah. Well, first I had to heal. I had to fix my relationship with exercise. I had to fix my brain. I had to scan of my brain at the Amy Clinic right after that scene I described for you. And that was just more confirmation that I am unhealthy, literally. He's like, I know what you do, but these are not healthy results.

Isn't it funny? So you are at the height of teaching people to be healthy. But the reality is, I think we get very confused. The fitness industry is different than, say, what I. I just was interviewing Colleen Walker from Mind Body Green, and they really say, now it's not wellness, it's well being. And I think that's what we need to shift into thinking. It's like, what's your well being?

If you were someone who had a physique or a fitness career, immediately everyone's like, okay, I need Nutrition advice from you too. I remember when I signed my infomercial contracts, they were like, okay, so what is the diet plan? I'm like, I don't have any background in nutrition. And they're like, well, you need to diet plan to go with this. I'm like, okay, but I don't know anything about this. I just, you know. And they said, well, we'll have someone write one for you and you sign off on. I was like, okay. You know, just so many things that we were doing then because it was like social media and the times and everyone was kind of doing it. And so I slipped into this place where it happened so slowly that once I decided to leave, I had to go, who am I? What do I know? What do I need to undo? And how do I get healthy on the inside? And I need to tell my audience that I'm doing this because I'm stepping away and they need to understand why I stopped posting any. For four or five years, I posted no zero fitness content.

Wow.

Nothing. Not a video. I didn't do any podcast related to fitness or health. I only did business because I really need to take a break. I really said I don't belong here. Given this platform. If I've led so many people, including myself, astray, let me figure things out without the pressure of a contract or a business or, you know, you've got to sell so many videos. Like, I just want to know, how do I become healthy? And I started with my brain. I started by changing my sleep, exercising a lot less, learning to eat food, learning what foods were anti inflammatory for me, what worked for me, learning to slow down. And it took four or five years to get to a place where I'm like, I love my body again. I had to do the reverse dieting thing. Like I started to gain weight and.

Tell people what reverse dieting is. I think it's such a. So I view diets as tools and I think reverse dieting is such an important tool. And especially if someone has damaged their metabolism, this is probably the most important tool you can use and it's scary. So for you to go through it.

The process of reverse dieting is helping your body to have metabolic flexibility disability. So I had reduced my calories and it was in such a calorie gap, sit for so long, exercising endlessly and then not consuming the right kind of foods that I had no metabolism right.

It's metabolic adaptation.

So I did gain weight, you know, and what was hard about that was I was also in perimenopause oh, boy.

Yeah.

And so then you're really like, what is going on? And I didn't know how much of this is because I'm fixing my diet, my relationship with food and fitness, and how much of this is perimenopause. I found a really great integrative doctor to help me through that process. But the one thing I will say, jj, that I didn't expect to have happen is I felt so much better when I was, like, underweight and undernourished. I felt anxiety. I always was thinking about my body every meal. I was obsessed with food, and I couldn't relax. It was consumed by every thought. And once I started learning how to eat the right way and balance my hormones, I was like, even though I put on some weight, I don't know, maybe six pounds when you're five, two.

That'S a lot, you know, 20 on me.

Right. And I was like, I fell in love with my body again, and I started learning how to eat foods and to prepare foods, and it was just such a happier time.

And when you think about going through. When you're in perimenopause, the single most important thing that you can do is that take time de stress. Like that. Of all of the things.

Yeah.

And, you know, I used to do meditation when I worked out. It's like, no, no, no. Sit your ass down, close your eyes, you know, and relax. Yeah. And take some time.

Right.

It's like, if you can't do that, produce your estrogen, what you need through your adrenal glands. At that point, you're going to be in trouble. So let's go back over to you. So there you are. You're taking this time. You're taking some space. Yeah, you're.

I'm getting much healthier, that's for sure. And I really was focused just on doing fitness and nutrition for me only. And I felt so much healthier. And all of my markers were improving with the exception of my cortisol. And I also made a list of what things get me the most stressed that I. I don't even admit. And I just kind of looked at all of them and said, which of these things, even though I love them, cause me the most stress and I have. There's something I could do about it. And what calms me. The answer was doing less and spending a lot more time just with my husband and friends, where they just give you energy. And so I made.

Well, she's supposed to be the person.

Well, I. Listen, let's be honest. There's a lot of people in our space who are friends because you could do something for me. And, you know, I've got too many friends and different networks for me to. That feels stressful to keep up with all these relationships. So it's like I closed my world in a little bit.

I've tightened up my circle big time.

So.

And that helped because until then, I felt like, God, there's so. I feel stressed out that I'm not being a good enough friend and I'm not connecting with this person, networking with that person. And I needed to slow down and I needed to not put so much pressure on myself. Like, if I didn't get a podcast done, and I would say, I don't, I don't have to. We own the business, so I don't have to do that.

Isn't it funny when you own your own business, you tend to be the worst boss, like, to yourself.

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To confirm our credit card info. Wait, I got a security alert from McAfee. It flagged that message as a scam. McAfee's scam detector automatically spots and alerts you to suspicious texts, emails, and deep fake videos. Learn more@mcafee.com online protection. So last year, that's one big change we made. And then added walking. That made a huge change, I think, in my stress level.

I loved seeing that, too, that you were talking about. Neat. You were doing this walking challenge because it's really interesting and I think it's part of what happened during the pandemic when I had a big stress attack and got autoimmune gastritis. During the pandemic, I think I wasn't paying attention to my steps back then. Like, I'm a maniac about watching this right now. Like, I'm focused on it. But I'm betting that I was probably saying sitting down. More like five, 6,000 steps a day versus 12 or 15,000.

That's where I was.

That makes a difference.

I didn't even think about it. My whole thing was, I killed at the gym. Nobody works my age works as hard as I do. I kill it. I'm doing these HIIT workouts. I'm doing strength training. And you know when you have to fill the form at the doctor's office, I'm click checking out, very active. Then I started looking at my oura ring numbers and I'm like, wait, how many hours was I inactive? What is going on here? Then I started looking at my step count and it was embarrassingly low. And I was like, I have. I got a standing desk. I started creating stacking new habits onto old habits. So when I'm scrolling social media now, I stand up. If nothing else, I just stand up.

If I don't pace back and forth.

At least I stand up.

I got a little treadmill under my desk too.

Yeah.

And I also, our house is two stories and when we moved in, I go, oh, I'll put a, like espresso machine up here and a fridge. And I go, no, I won't. My office up there. And I will have to go down for anything certain all day long. It's like up and down, up and.

Down, up and down.

But it makes a difference.

You don't realize it until you track. So with all things, we have to know what's best for us and use common sense. And the health and fitness industry for years has been dependent upon making the consumer dependent. You're not smart enough to know how to eat. Right. You're not smart enough to know how to work out. Right. So here are all the rules and you better follow them. Exactly.

Yep. And, and making you like, you know, because when are we most likely to do something? Because we're fearful.

Yeah.

Whereas that's why I think if we can think about where we're going next with excitement. Like Mark Hyman shared with me that if you are excited about aging, you live seven and a half years longer. I go, there's an easy one.

Yes. It's so easy.

I'll take that and add all these up. Like, okay, let's do that one. And then you start to go, okay, how do we create the life we love?

Yeah. Right.

And now you live in this beautiful place where you can walk and you take time. It's like you can do this.

Yeah. And there are seasons when it's harder.

To Young, young kids.

Yeah.

Come on.

When my kids are little. When your kids are living, you're running a business. I always tell women, first of all, I had a lot of help. I had a full time personal assistant. I had a full time house manager. I want to be very clear about all that so that you don't put that pressure on yourself. You're supposed to be doing all these things. The thing you should be doing is the thing that's the number one priority to you. But every season is different. And I know what your experience has been, but for me, every season gets better.

Yeah, this season's definitely the best. Well, I think the time when your kids are young is really challenging. It is like I look back and I go, I have no idea how I got through that, no idea how that happened. But I think for all of us now, the priority has to be on health, but in a different way. Like, I feel like the 20 and 30 year old me did everything out of kind of loathing and you're not good enough. Where now it's like something happens when you hit 50. We're like, oh, I'm great.

You know, I want women to get there. I think we're there. But I hear from so many women who are struggling with their mental health once they hit menopause. They are struggling with this new body that's working against them and things are shifting and changing and they feel like they're losing their youth. And then it becomes this downward cycle. Now I'm not getting sleep, so now my cortisol's up and I'm craving sugary foods and I'm not moving as much. And now I feel worse about. It just becomes a downward spiral that you can get stuck there, you can.

And you can get out of it.

You can get out of it.

So let's talk about. Because you, you approach this, it seems like you gave yourself that time. But what are some of the 10 tips that you would give to get out of that downward spiral?

First thing I would say is you have to shift your mindset and your beliefs because everything else follows from there. So stop following young, hot 20 somethings and 30 somethings and start following women who are older than you. And so I think that's number one because that's going to start to shift your mindset. And then you have to start taking little baby steps and patting yourself on the back and don't get caught up in the. I need to do this perfectly and I want to help women break that thinking.

Yes.

You know, because there isn't one way to do anything there. We're all each very different with different epigenetics, with different seasons, different stresses, different tastes, different everything. And so if nothing else, I think once you reach this place where you, you're just a little bit wiser, like tap into that. And I want to go, yeah, this, this defies common sense. I'm not doing this. Like what makes sense for me. Start with your mindset. Then the next thing I'd say is start moving. Start with a plan, like set a step count. But this week I found a study where they had Taken two groups of mid age women and they gave one of them the prescription of a certain number of minutes to exercise per day. And the other group focused on step count. And then they compared their activity levels at the end of the study. And the women who were asked to follow or meet a daily step count goal were nearly 60% were active.

Wow. So, wow.

When we know better, we do better. So now I'm, I'm going to change you by step and get you and say if it's appropriate for you, focus on a step count.

As long as you know you're not one of the ones that gets really crazy about it. That's amazing, right? Yeah.

And that brings you closer with your partner. Take that walk together. You've been doing what?

Well, we have. We can't do it when we're traveling because we'll really throw our suitcases over. But the little rocking guest.

Oh, yeah.

So.

So after dinner we'll go do a little rock around the neighborhood. Yeah.

You know what I found? And that's a habit we kept after our travels to Europe. And I'm looking around, I'm like, wait a second, there's no obese people.

Like, this is not America. Not in Korea either. I'll tell you, we went to Korea this summer and I looked around, I go, tim, I haven't seen anyone who's even overweight.

Yeah.

Wow.

I was away.

It was like complete opposite to here.

We continue balance that habit after being here. But here's the other thing that I noticed is you just intuitively eat a little lighter because you know you're going to walk and it help improves your digestion. And we look forward to them every single, you know, the first couple of weeks when we got home to the United States, I'm like, are we going to do this?

And he's like, no one walks.

Yeah, but it's one of the best habits and it's made a huge difference. My husband's lost 10% body fat in the last nine months. And those are just a few minor changes that we've made.

Yeah, I mean, see, that's the thing. It's those little things.

Oh, oh, and I forgot to tell you, we both color cortisol levels in half. Amazing. Before me, all the little things. So it was with intention, sitting down and going, what does it mean to reduce stress? It's not just a phrase. How can I do this? Sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper and making a list.

And so do you actually cut some things out?

Yeah, I did. And it's always a work in progress.

Yeah, yeah, I actually do that. I teach our mastermind group to do that, where we will get together and go, okay, now we're going to look at what else we can automate, delegate, delete.

Yep, absolutely.

And you know, it's one of those.

Things you have to do because you don't realize what a big impact it has on your hormones, people.

But that's crazy. Your cortisol shift like that.

Yes.

Amazing.

Stacking those little things that you feel like, is this going to make a difference in totality? It does. So you have to be patient and you have to be intentional.

Yeah. Okay, so you've got the walking. What goes after that? Because you've been killing it, Jim.

Yeah, I have strength.

Look at that. I.

And this is just my personal aesthetics. We. So I do three days, a week of heavy lower body strength training and I do two days. Well, mix it up. Do some upper body, lower body or full body. And I have also return to intermittent fasting and a very relaxed approach.

How do you do it?

I wait until I'm hungry and I don't worry about a time on the clock. If I worry about what time I'm done eating, I just try to stop it after dinner.

You know, I just. Did you know who Dr. Andy Galquin is?

No.

Oh, my gosh. I think he's the top exercise physiologist he talked about recently. Goes. The single most important thing that you can do as you age is make sure that you maintain your leg strength, because it's is the second biggest one. Just think about it. You got to get up the stairs, you got to get off the toilet. You like leg strength? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I've completely changed my physique by focusing heavy on strength training and.

And have your legs gotten huge?

No, it's reduced my body fat. I've never, ever, even at the height of my fitness and commercials, I would have never been seen in public in a pair of shorts. I wouldn't.

What?

No, no. But now I'm like, walk. I'll walk away from you in a thong bikini. I don't like. I'm proud of my muscle, I'm proud of my legs. I'm proud of the work they've done. Yeah. And the strength really does give you a confidence. It increases your testosterone, it increases your IGF1. It creases your human growth hormone all too.

Like, this is how you create your immune system in your.

If you're over 40 and you're not lazy, if you're over 40, you're not lifting. When I say lifting, I would say heavy. Because I see these women with three pound weights.

I'm like, your phone weighs more. Yeah, put it down.

Like Southern.

Yeah. No. Can we talk about how all of these things we learn from each other women? My doctors aren't talking to me about any of this. I mean, I remember going before I found a good integrative, going to my doctor and saying, I can't sleep and I'm gaining weight. And they're like, well, that's aging. So do you want a sleeping pill or maybe should go on a diet? It's like, gee, now we talk about hormones. We can't.

Why.

But thank God that we are educating each other and sharing videos like this with each other and saying, listen, here's some science on creatine. Here's some science.

Now here's the thing. And Andy Galvin also, he pointed out to me because doctors haven't. They've got like an hour of nutrition and nothing in exercise. He goes, here's the reality. I think, you know, I was all the way up in a PhD program in exercise studios when I dropped out because I wanted to study nutrition. And that was all exercise science. And I still look at this and go, oh, my gosh, there's so much to learn. Like, I'm like unpacking everything and then you have the nutrition side and all those classes over there. And then somehow we expect a doctor to go all through medical school and residency and now they're supposed to also. They're all different things. It's just that everyone needs to kind of know, oh, you know what? I don't know, Go over here.

Yes.

And I think the important message for women in menopause is things are going sideways. You need to do everything you can for stress. Put all. There's no margin for error anymore. So all the stuff you can to take care of yourself and then find yourself a really good functional medicine doctor who specializes in balancing hormones.

Yes.

Because they're out there and they are fabulous.

You know, you, you have to phase your doctors as we have to phase our workouts and phase our diet and phase with our seasons like you just do.

Yeah.

It's a certain point you have to recognize they only have so much training. And now you, you need a specialist. You need someone who focuses and understands longevity.

Right. Like, think of the person that you were going to so you'd have healthy babies. Is that the one that's going to really get you the same?

Not my case.

Now I started taking hrt. Like, the minute my. I knew my hormones dropped. I went to the doctor.

I go, do you remember how old you were?

I was in my late 40s, and I literally remember going and thinking, I'm not recovering from my workouts like I used to. I couldn't figure it out. I'm like, this went on for, like, a month. Like, I can't. I'm like, why am I sore? And then I started. My gum started to bleed, and I went into my dentist, and I go, what the heck is going on? He goes, estrogen. And I was like, all right, I know what to do here. Went over to my doctor who's helped me all through this. Dr. Alan Christensen was like, the first one when I knew my thyroid went down. So, literally, I've been balanced through this the whole time.

Yeah.

And I think this is important because I have so many women. Wait, like, what are you waiting for? You not need to feel miserable. So when did you start doing. You're on it.

Yes.

Yes. Yeah, let's talk about that. So I started at age, I think, 46 or 47. And hormones are all over the place at that point. So, yeah, every month it felt like it was just been fun. Yeah. Perimenopause. Just put your seatbelt on. But it made it so much easier to transition into menopause. And so now it's. It's up to us to spread the word amongst our girlfriends. Like, no, there's new research, and you need to take a look at it, because the earlier you get on hormone replacement therapy, the longer you're going to live and the more vitality you're going to have. Just because someone has a doctorate on their wall doesn't necessarily mean that they're up to date on the most recent research.

Right. And the other side of that, because I had someone ping me, and she goes, I'm 70. And I just am so upset because now I'm hearing everything I had. I think Dr. Felice Gersh on my podcast, going through the Women. Women's Health Initiative, point by point, all of the problems with them. You're like, oh, my goodness. I mean, it did such a disservice. She was like, now it's too late. I'm like, actually, no, it is not too late. And that's been debunked as well. Yeah.

It's all.

It's like. It's never, like, the minute things start going wonky is when you want to start doing this. No need to be miserable. And some might Say, you know, it wasn't hard for you. Well, if you can get the hormone balancing piece, then it's going to make it easier. But then, you know, you get on estrogen and you're fine. So if you're thinking about this, unpack it. And there's amazing functional medicine doctors that will assess your risk too, just to. They can go through all of your genetics and epigenetics to look at all of your family history and all of that put together and go, okay, here. But the reality is women are dying the most of heart disease. And you look at hormones and they protect your heart, your brain, your bones.

Right.

You know, and the small one is breast cancer. So there's all this life if, if.

Nothing else, at a minimum, understand that there are so many ways to improve your hormone balance, even from a natural perspective. Right. Things like strength training. Like, there's so many things you can do with lifestyle and supplementation for that person who's like, it's just not for me. I've done my research and I, I don't want to feel guilty because I not doing hrt. That's okay. That's. We just want women to know all the information so that you can make the decision.

That's right. Choose wisely. Yeah, choose wisely. But you have options.

Yeah.

Which is fantastic.

One of the things I really love.

About you is your willingness just to go, hey, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I changed. I was wrong over here. This is how I pulled myself out of it. Here are the things I'm doing now. And then like you're flipping pictures in your bikini.

I like their straps.

It makes me so happy. It's like, go you.

Well, you know, that's the best part about aging is like, you can always say, I'm older than you. What do I care what you think? You know what I mean? It's like I would have never posted photos like that ever in my life when I was in my 40s. And now I'm just like, I don't care if some people are uncomfortable with it. I want to inspire women who are afraid of Beijing. I want them to know, oh, no, it gets good.

Really good.

Really good.

Yes.

Now you're back with your health brand. So we've got, we've got some fun things we can share. We've got this energy reset thing.

Yeah.

This 14 day energy reset. So we're going to put that@jjvirgin.com forward slash. Chalene, what is it?

First of all, I want to be in charge. I didn't want any marketing machine to tell me what to tell women and what they should be doing. I want to empower them and help them to understand. You sit in the driver's seat. I'll keep you accountable and give you some tools and give you some information.

Information.

But if you don't have the energy, you don't.

You can't do anything.

You don't feel like shopping for the right foods, you don't feel like getting in your step count. You don't feel like doing anything. So I wanted to help women understand, like, let's start with your energy and go from there. So it's just 14 days where I take you on a guided walk. While you're walking, you put in your little earbuds. You'll hear from me, you hear from jj, and we're teaching each other, like, what does it mean to get your energy back naturally without energy drinks? Like, how do you do develop those habits? Like, what are the little things you can do to get your energy back? Because once you have your energy, that. That's half the battle.

Yeah, perfect. 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 find follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetoj.com See you next time. 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 this show is solely at your own risk.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Boeckl, 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 frothy 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 so join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshould I read next podcast.com to find out more.