Ridiculous Myths About Weight Loss Over 40 You Should Never Believe

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But 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.

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Are you ready to bust some myths? Because nothing makes me crazier than all the crazy myths that surround weight loss as we get to be 40 plus, starting with the metabolism myth. And this is the one that says, oh, our metabolism doesn't really change till 60. And hey, actually that's true in a way. And let me unpack this. So there's some studies that have come out that have said your metabolism really is about the same until 60. And then things start to shift. Except there are a couple things that start happening earlier and then that say 40 plus, that will totally impact your metabolism. And maybe, just maybe, you've noticed some of these. And so this is to show you that you're not crazy. First thing that starts to happen is your hormones start to fluctuate. Now here's the thing. Estrogen in the right amount helps you burn fat. So if estrogen starts to tank, this is going to be problematic, right? And testosterone, super key important if you're building muscle. So if testosterone starts to go low, this is a problem too. Now we already know that muscle mass loss is a problem because Starting at age 40, we start to lose it a little bit, especially if we're not using it. And this is super important because muscle is our metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter and boosts our metabolism. But it's also our sugar sponge that helps absorb the carbohydrates we eat. We can put em in our liver, but more importantly, we can store about 400 grams of them in our muscles. So muscles are key here. And unless you know how to track them, you wouldn't really know if you were losing it. So at home you can use a bioimpedance scale. They're, you know, accurate enough, you're going to be looking at the same thing over time. But what you really want to do is go get a DEXA scan at least twice a year too, and correlate it with your home bioimpedance. But that's the first thing. If you start to lose some muscle mass, yes, that's going to impact your metabolism and it's also going to Impact insulin sensitivity, which will also impact your metabolism. Of course, hormones are going crazy like we just talked about. And if estrogen's starting to go down, that's going to make you better at storing fat. Maybe you notice. And if cortisol's coming up, that's going to make you better at storing fat around your waist, right? So if you're starting to notice, why am I starting to get belly fat? My mother, by the way, she used to call it shifting sands. I was like, oh, I'm not having any of that shifting sands thing. But that shifting sands where you seem to be losing your butt and it's all going into your gut, you know what I'm talking about? That is because estrogen's dropping, cortisol's rising, and you're becoming insulin resistant. That is the triple whammy for belly fat. Now, another thing that starts to happen as we age is you could start to see your thyroid go down. And likely before the labs will show any real problem, you'll start to notice some things, like maybe your hair is a little drier or it's starting to fall out more, your nails are more brittle, you're losing the outer third of your eyebrow. You're a little depressed, you're a little constipated, your LDL cholesterol goes up. Then you check your thyroid and it's a little bit low. Your TSH is a little bit higher than it should be, but not much. But fat plus symptoms should have you scooting over to go work with a hormone doc, a functional medicine doc, too, because if your thyroid's low, it's really gonna make it hard for you to lose weight. So maybe if you had a metabolism test, you wouldn't see that big of a shift. But the things that impact your metabolism and impact your body's ability to burn fat, they're all going wonky. So that's the first myth that we're gonna bust. The next Myth, let's bust 40 plus. What you need to do to lose weight is that myth that we need to eat a plant based diet to lose weight. And in fact, the opposite as we age is really true. And here's why. As we age, we need more protein, not less. Because of a phenomenon called anabolic resistance, where it's harder for us to trigger muscle protein synthesis by triggering mtor. So we are not breaking down our protein and digesting it as well. That's why I love to use protein digestive enzymes. We need more protein, especially if you're more plant based. You're not going to get the amino acids in the way that you need them as well from plants. The quality is not as big. Sorry, don't shoot the messenger. So you're going to need to eat more protein and you're also going to be missing some things like creatine. There's a very interesting hypothesis and you can look this up. It's called the protein leverage hypothesis. These bug researchers discovered this and what they discovered through bugs, first proven now in humans, is that we will overeat in order to get the amount of protein that we need. And so when I read this hypothesis, I go, oh my gosh. That's why when I go to a plant based restaurant, I always leave feeling hungry and like, I need to eat more. But you'll basically overeat carbs or fat in order to get to the protein level that you need to get to. While we want to eat a good plant based diet, and by the way, the American diet's about 85% plants, it's just eating corn and soy. You want to eat animal protein plus plants to overcome the anabolic resistance to get the protein that you need for muscle protein synthesis so that we hold onto that muscle as we age. Okay, now speaking of plants, here's the next one. If you want to lose weight, you know what you need to do? Just do a juice cleanse. So I am on just a mission to blow up the urban legend of the juice cleanse. Because here's the thing, toxins come in from everywhere. Even if we went to some of the most pristine places in the world, we'd still have toxins there. Just because we've dumped so much into our environment and the water's flowing, the air's blowing, right? So there's toxins everywhere. We need to be detoxifying on a daily basis through protein, through amino acids, because we need those to get the toxins out of our body, through fiber, through all of the bright colored plants and the phytonutrients, through sweat, through circulation. We needed to be detoxifying every single day. But what we don't want to do is try to do that through a juice cleanse. The reason being is we need to have amino acids to grab ahold of the toxins. See, juice cleanses, all of those phytonutrients can free up the toxins from our fat cells where we store them. And especially if you're trying to lose fat, you can free up the toxins. But if you don't have those amino acids and we need amino acids every single day. We can live without carbs, we can live without fat every day because we have storage. But we cannot live without amino acids. We don't have a place for them. We would have to steal from muscle. You do not want to steal from muscle. And you must have amino acids to grab onto those toxins and take them out of the body. Now remember, detoxification, it's critical for fat loss because when you're losing body fat, your freeing up toxins, they get stored in the fat, we gotta get those out. And if you have a high toxic burden, it can actually slow down your metabolism, right? And it can lead to insulin resistance, it can lead to estrogen dominance, it can lead to lower thyroid problems, it can lead to leaky gut, it can create all sorts of problems. But we wanna make sure that we are detoxing correctly. And again, that's clean protein. Plus plants with lots of fiber and color, lots of water, exercise for circulation and sweating, infrared sauna, shout out to my buddies over at sunlighten. And then if you want some additional support, I would really go and work with a functional medicine doctor. The next one, you need to be in ketosis to burn fat. Here's the thing, ketosis is not an on off switch, it's a degree. The deal is you need to have low insulin to access stored body fat. So the first step here, if you want to use stored fat for fuel, is to help overcome your insulin resistance. As we age is we start to become more insulin resistant if we're not working against it. And what are the things that can contribute to that? Well, muscle is one of the first places we can start to either become insulin resistant or restore insulin sensitivity. Resistance training is key. Stress is super important here. If you're stressed out, you'll become insulin resistant. If you are inflamed, it will create insulin resistance. If you don't sleep well, it will be insulin resistant. So in order for you to burn fat, you've got to have your insulin be able to come back down to baseline. It's got to be somewhere in the 2 to 5 range. If it's higher than that, it basically locks the doors to fat cells. So you can't burn stored fat for fuel. And it also lowers your metabolism. A couple other things that can help here besides the resistance training, walking after your meals, making sure you eat protein first. And one of the things I really love is the nutrient berberine. It's amazing for gut health, but it also is really good for helping with blood sugar balance and insulin Sensitivity. So think of ketosis as a degree, as a shift that you go through. And ideally, if you eat a lower carbohydrate diet, where you're getting the majority of your carbohydrates from non starchy vegetables, a little bit of fruit, and then maybe a serving of slow, low carbs or two, not much. And more than that. I always say you have to earn your carbs through exercise. So you're keeping your carbohydrates the thing that you can readily use. Right. And then when you keep your carbohydrates lower, you're able to access stored fat for fuel, because now you don't have the big stores of glycogen in your liver. So now your body's gonna need to access stored fat for fuel, and it can do that because your insulin's low. So that is super important. Now, speaking of being able to access stored fat per fuel and burn it, the other thing that we need to talk about is the need to be in a deficit in order to lose weight. And this is like one of the biggest debates in the weight loss communities. There's really two different schools of thought. One is the calories in, calories out Bangkok model of weight loss, and. And one is the carbohydrate insulin model of weight loss. And that's. Your body's a chemistry lab. I like to say your body is a chemistry lab, not a bank account. And calories count, but they don't count the same. And so the way that you can do this, that will work so much better is if you first focus on, and I really love to do this anyways, to focus on adding before you take away. First I want you to focus on your quality and macros. So what I would love you to do is use a macro tracking app. I love the Cronometer app because it's free and easy to use. All you're going to do is to start, is just track, don't change anything. This will be the hardest thing to do. The minute you start to track, you're going to be aware and you're going to go, huh, Ooh, I didn't know that had that many carbs or I didn't know that was so high in fat. Right. But the first thing that you do is just track and check it out. Track for a week, get your averages. How much of protein are you eating in each meal? How much protein are you eating a day? How much fiber are you getting in? How many overall calories? Then the next thing you're gonna do is make sure that you're getting the protein that you need at each meal, at least 30 grams, a hundred grams overall for your three meals, but ideally 0.7 grams to one gram per pound of target body weight. So that's your next thing. After that, I want you to really focus on getting in your non starchy vegetables. And you wanna get in five or more servings a day that is basically on a tracking app. Because it's about a cup of raw or a half a cup of cooked, it's going to be somewhere between 5 and 10 grams is a serving. So let's say that is at least 25 grams of non starchy vegetables. But I would love to say let's push it, let's go big, let's see if you can get to 40 or 50 grams of non starchy vegetables and then two servings of fruit then. And we're crowding out the other stuff. See what I'm doing here, we're adding before we take away. So that's what you're really going to focus on here. And then you'll see how you're doing and then you might go, wow, okay, you know what, I'm maintaining my weight at this. So what I'm going to do is cut back down on my carbs a little bit or I'm exercising a lot, so I feel good about my carbs. I'll cut down on my fat a little bit because carbs and fat are inversely related. But you're going to see if you need to do that because you might find that just by restoring your insulin sensitivity, right, by lowering those carbs, by doing the things we talked about earlier, that you're now able to burn that stored body fat and you're fine. Because if you go and you really start to lower those calories and you do that chronic caloric deficit, you can do it in spurts. And this is where I really love to use a little bit of intermittent fasting. But if you downshift, your body downshifts. And remember, as you're losing weight, your body is going to need less calories. That's why we want to make sure that we're putting on muscle to offset that as much as possible. And you really want to make sure as you're going through this that, that you're losing fat and you're holding onto or building muscle, which is why a bioimpedia scale is so important. And this is a slow process. Your first week in, if you really cut your carbs, you'll See a bigger shift because you just dropped some water. But the reality is you lose up to no more than 2 pounds of fat a week. And that's a lot. And so you want to think more, depending on how much you have to lose, of losing somewhere between 1 and 2 pounds of fat a week. And if you're putting on muscle, you, you might not even see much of a shift in the scale, but you'll see a big shift in your body composition. Next one, you have to intermittent fast to lose weight. Now, I am a big fan of timing and a big fan of time restricted eating, but you do not have to eat within a five hour window or a one hour window or eight hour window to lose weight. Here's the deal. And what I want you to think of with anything you're doing diet wise and lifestyle wise really is that these are all tools. And so you want to use the right tool for the right problem, right? If I needed to screw something in, I wouldn't take out a hammer and slam the screw. That wouldn't get me anywhere, right? So if I'm having challenges with insulin sensitivity and blood sugar, intermittent fasting is going to be a really fast way to help restore that. But if I'm really working on building muscle, intermittent fasting is not necessarily going to be my best friend. Because if you're eating in an eight hour window, it's hard to get in those three meals and enough protein. So think about what you need to prioritize here. Now, I really like time restricted eating within a 9 to 12 hour window. I think it's super important and I think you could add in one to two days a week of restricting down from that, maybe eating within a five hour window, which is great because you kick out a meal so you lower your calories that day too. And so that can help, right, without doing that chronic caloric adaption. But remember, if you're doing, let's say a five hour or one meal a day, every single day, you're not going to be able to build and hold onto the muscle that you need to. And muscle is priority one, it's priority two, it's priority three. All right, the next one. Oh my gosh, I need some fat burners. I need fat burners to lose weight. You know what the best fat burner is? The best fat burner is muscle. Muscle is where we burn our fat. Muscle is key for everything. And muscle is where we start to restore insulin sensitivity. It's the fastest way for you to restore insulin sensitivity by building muscle because if you're insulin resistant, you will not be burning fat. Don't care what kind of fat burners that you use. And that's what I find with most people. In fact, I used to sell one and I discontinued it because I was like, you know what? You need muscle. Like, put muscle on. This is not going to be able to overcome you not lifting weights. You got to lift weights, right? That's the fat burner that you need. Dumbbells. But there are some other things that can help support good metabolism besides muscle. One is water. Water is super key. You know, if you are just mildly dehydrated, your body actually starts to convert glucose to fructose and store it as fat. And that will be belly fat bell, by the way. So that's super key. And of course, protein is another great metabolic booster because protein's the most thermic of all of the macronutrients. So it's 20 to 30% higher in the thermic effect of food versus carbs and fat. So just replacing some of your carbs and fat with protein can also help your metabolism. All right, next one. And.

Oh, my gosh.

I still think back. I've been at this a long time, 40 years. And way back in the olden days, I still remember people being coached to not lift weight until they lost the weight. Literally. You just need to do cardio. Don't start lifting weights until you lose the weight. And I'm like, that is the best backwards way to do this. If you try to lose weight purely by doing cardio, you're also burning up muscle. This is not what you want to do. And besides, who has time? Now I want you to do some walking after meals to lower the blood sugar response to meals. Super key, important. The other cardio I want you to do, and, you know, the more you can move, the better. This is why I love tracking devices that say, hey, get up, right? I got a walking treadmill for under my desk. So when I'm doing conference calls, I can get on the treadmill and walk slowly. We want to do that. That's not exercise. That's controlled falling. I want you to do resistance training and HIIT training. These are the ones that I want you to focus on. And resistance training, if I had to pick just one, would be the winner. Because this is where you're going to restore insulin sensitivity, right? This is where you're going to start burning fat. This is where you're going to have better glucose control. So it's key. And then the other Cardio that I want you to do is twice a week, do some high intensity interval training. So if you've been going out for a walk, keep the walk in after dinner. But the other time you're doing it, go out, warm up for a couple minutes, then sprint like you're getting chased and then walk it off. And what you're going to find is that it's going to be horrible at first and you're going to hate me. You're welcome. But then it gets easier and easier. And by the way, here's the sad thing. Make it harder, don't let it get easier. But you'll find that you keep recovering faster and faster, which is amazing. So hopefully you weren't falling prey to any of those myths. But if you were, we are fixing them, right? We just blow through them. Because I know there's so much crazy stuff out there online. Here's the bottom line. You can be in your best shape ever. Now, I know it's like, oh, it's all over when you're 40 plus. Nope. You can be in your best shape in your 40s, your 50s, your 60s, your 70s. You can, but it starts with the decision making, right? And then it has to be followed with the commitment, which means you gotta take consistent action. To be in your best shape means you gotta improve your body composition. And that is not the same as losing weight. I mean, you could lose weight and actually make yourself more unhealthy if you lose more muscle than fat. And that is why you have to track and you have to make sure that you're optimizing protein intake. And I hope I've hit this home enough that you're doing that resistance training. Mission critical. Now I'm going to show you exactly how to find and track your healthy body fat percentage. In this video on the best way to measure body fat. You'll learn how to use testing to fine tune fat loss and muscle gain, how to find your ideal body fat range, how often you should weigh and measure what to eat to build muscle and burn fat. The best exercises for healthy body composition and so much more. So watch it right here.

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