Stop Counting Calories, Do This Instead…

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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 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 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. 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 spirit 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 interface 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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You to suspicious texts, emails, and deep fake videos. Learn more@mcafee.com online protection. So if calorie counting worked long term, you probably wouldn't be watching this video, right? There's a different way of tracking your food intake that works so much better, and I'm about to show you why. I mean, calories count, but where they come from counts way more. And it turns out that your macro ratios, that's protein, fat and carbs, can impact your metabolism by as much as 30%. And eating the wrong foods, things like ultra processed foods, can actually lower the thermic effect of that meal by as much as 50%. I mean, these are huge swings can make a dramatic difference in your body composition. So while eating too much healthy food is unhealthy and too many calories can cause weight gain, eating the right amount of macros for you and avoiding or minimizing metabolism, zapping foods can make fat loss practically effortless. So the secret is to go beyond counting calories and shift to tracking macros, especially protein. Now, I'm only talking for a short while. I want you to think of this like a macro audit so that you can dial in the right formula for you. I'm going to give you a couple reasons why you want to do this. So there's a Duke study that showed that people who tracked consistently lost more weight than those who didn't. And Kaiser Permanente center for Health Research published a study of nearly 1700 participants in which it was found that individuals who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. In fact, the more food records kept by participants in the study, the more weight they lost. And then there was a new study led by Stanford Medicine that showed that at least one thing is super clear. No matter which weight loss tactic you choose, you're typically more successful if you track your progress with digital health tools. According to this study, the closer people tracked their weight loss efforts with things like smart watches or digital scales and diet monitoring websites, the more weight they tended to lose. The analysis also revealed that individuals who tracked their diet or physical activity digitally were more engaged, meaning they were more consistently active in using their tools than those who tracked Their behavior through more traditional means, like, they wrote it down. Right? So that is all to convince you that just for a short amount of time, like, give me a month, that you should be tracking. Now, hopefully that's convinced you. So what should you be tracking? Here's what we're going to do. So you're doing macro tracking. Again, I want you to think of this like an audit. So what are the important things here? Well, there's protein, there's carbs, there's fat and there's fiber. So we're going to look at fiber and goal of being at least 30 grams or more a day. We're going to look at carbs. And by the way, a lot of.

These apps will have.

Do you want to have carbs or net carbs? Just do carbs. And then you're also going to look at overall calories because you want to kind of get a feel. Even though this is an imperfect science because of the thermic effect of food, et cetera, you still just want to get a feel for, like, how much do I really do? What, where do I feel my best? So one of the things that you're going to need is a food scale and some cups and spoons, right? Because you gotta weigh in and you gotta measure. Here's the deal. We tend to underestimate what we eat by 40%. Once you start to do this and you see, oh, this is what 5 ounces of chicken breast looks like. Ah, this is what a cup of almond milk yogurt looks like. You'll get it, but left your own devices. Those little amounts get bigger and bigger. Now, remember, this isn't forever. So here's how I want you to start. The first thing that I want you to do is you're just going to track without changing a thing. You're just being curious and gathering information. So you're tracking again, your protein, your fat, your carbs, your fibers and your overall calories. Just do this for one week. Because what you will find just doing this for one week is you will make better choices. I saw this with my husband. He was like fighting me to track. And then finally he gave in. And what he discovered was he was eating a lot of fat and carbs. He wasn't thinking about. He was doing, you know, some siete chips with hummus. Just kind of stuff, healthy food. But again, too much healthy foods, unhealthy. So it really helped him become aware of how much extra stuff was just kind of getting added in, especially on the fat zone. So that's the first week and you get really clear of like, how much fiber am I getting in average per day? And carbs and protein. How much protein am I getting average when I get up in the morning and have break my fast? So that's the first part. Second part is protein. So all I want you to do for one week is focus on getting the right amount of protein for you. I will have a link below for my protein calculator so you can figure out exactly how much you need. And all you do this week is make sure you're getting that protein in. And what I want you to start to watch for is as you're doing that, what shifted in the rest of your macros and calories. So as you've started to increase your protein, because likely you will, because most people undereat protein anywhere from 30 to 50%. So as you start to do that, you'll go, oh, wow, I started to kick out a little bit of fat or I started to kick out a little bit of carbs. What's interesting is the research shows that when you increase protein, especially when you eat protein first, you actually tend to make better food choices. Especially you eat more non starchy vegetables. Now the other thing that happens as you increase protein is you have less cravings, you have better satiety, and you tend to eat less because beyond the satiety, it's also more thermic. It's using more calories. Protein has a way higher thermic effect of food than fat or carbs. 20 to 30% versus carbs, 5 to 10% versus fat negligible. Like 3% or less. All right, so that's the second thing you do. The third thing you do, and this is week by week, all right, super easy. Third week, I want to make sure that you're getting in at least 5 servings or more and hopefully more of non starchy vegetables each day. And two fruit servings. So what is a non starchy serving? It's a half a cup of cooked or a cup of raw. So cauliflower rice. Cook it up half, half a cup to a serving. Salad greens, a cup a serving. So you can see how easy this is. Like, I tend to get five servings at my dinner and five servings at my lunch. I would love to see you get 10 servings a day. Bonus points, star student. But at least five, that's your minimum. And two servings of fruit. Now, for fruit, here's the rules. Fresh or frozen. Not juiced, dried, syrup, jammed. Okay, so you want to Eat fresh or frozen fruit and ideally look for, you know, always conclude at least a berry serving in there. And then one more thing about the veggies and the fruit diversity of colors. Mix this up. Don't get into a veggie rut. And then start to look as you're doing this, we're really adding. Before we're taking away, we added the protein, now we added in more vegetables and some fruit. And I want you to look at what else is going on, what's shifting now in the rest of your macros and your overall calories because you're probably seeing that things are starting to look even better. The fourth thing that I want you to do is start to zero in on those carbohydrates. Now if you need a little bit more help here, this is the sugar impact diet where I really talk about the right types of carbs to reach for. Remember, all carbs except for fiber turn to sugar. It's just a difference of whether you're making them from the berries or the lentils or you're mainlining them from, say the Skittles, right? So you know which one I want you to choose. So carbs are going to be somewhere around 100 to 130. I do a hundred as a baseline, a hundred grams. And then I always say if you want more than that, earn them with exercise. And I do 25 grams per each 30 minutes of hard exercise. That's not going out for a walk. Now I'm monitoring fiber in here, but I'm not dealing with the net carbs. I'm just focusing on getting enough fiber. And basically 30 grams is sort of my low point. I really love 50. That's like star student again, right? There is 50. So that's the next thing. And then finally, I know I said four weeks, okay, but we're into the fifth. But the first week doesn't really count because you're just checking things out. The fifth one, we're really modulating fat. So think about where fat's going to come from. Now, when you eat animal protein, you get some fat in it, right? If you're eating wild fish, if you're eating grass fed beef, you're going to get some fat with that. And the cool thing is when you're eating these better animal choices, which are the only ones that you want to eat, you're also going to get more omega 3s and that is super duper important. So that's the first place you're going to start counting fat in which you'll See on the app, the app will do it naturally for you. Then add in what you're using for cooking. So maybe you're using a little bit of avocado oil, Maybe you're using some extra virgin olive oil on your salad, maybe using some coconut oil for cooking. That's what I want you to watch. And what I want you to really watch is use those ones and really avoid using more of the seed oils, the omega 6 oils here, just because they're more refined, they can be more damaged and more pro inflammatory. So I'm talking corn, sunflower, safflower, soy. Let's focus on instead the extra virgin olive oil, the avocado and the coconut. But again, we're just gonna use a little bit for cooking. What I tend to do with cooking is I'll start a saute with a little bit of avocado oil and then I will add in some bone broth. So things like that. So I'm not just heaving on a bunch of fat. And finally, if I have room for more fat, this is where I add in my whole food fats. And these would be things like nuts and seeds, avocado, coconut, olive, dark chocolate. I put that first. It should actually be dark chocolate, the nuts and seeds and avocado. Right. And I eat an ounce of dark chocolate at least every single day. That's the other part of it. Now here's the thing with fat adds up fast. And so you want to make sure you're really getting in because we've got the essential fatty acids we need, but we really want to focus more there on the essential fatty acids. And where I tend to go with that is I kind of like 60 grams as a starting point, or about 0.3 to 0.5 grams per pound of target body weight. But this is a real sliding scale here because some people feel better, lower carb, higher fat. Some people do better, higher fat, lower carb. The thing you never want to do is the high carb, high fat, low protein. That is the obesogenic formula. It's kind of the food guide pyramid. We already know what happened there, right? So that's something we don't want to go anywhere near. So you start playing around with that. Protein stays absolute. And then you really go through and you go, how do I feel here? How do I feel when I eat a lower carb, higher fat diet? How do I feel the opposite? And you should be able to do both, remember, and be metabolically flexible. That's what's super duper important. Now I Want to again drive this one home? You got to avoid the fat storing duo again. That's high carb plus high fat. What's that look like?

Cereal and milk.

Oh my gosh, a muffin and a latte, right? Chips and dip, all of that kind of stuff. And then the other thing that I want you to do and monitor on your app is I want you to monitor your water and your fluids. And again, you want to be drinking at least half your body weight in ounces every day, right? Plus 4 ounces for every 15 minutes of exercise. So make sure that you're getting all of that in super duper important. And the other thing that you can do on the app is that you can watch your eating window. And here's where I want you to focus. I want you to focus on an eating window. Max is 12 hours, but ideally it's more in that 9 to 10 hour range. Following the normal circadian rhythm. Shout out to Dr. Sachin Panda's work here where you wake up, you eat breakfast, you break your fast, somewhere between an hour to two hours after you wake up, you stop eating, three to four hours before bed, you eat about every four hours, right? And so if you have to eat higher protein, if you're a bigger person, need more protein, then you might need to eat four meals or you're super athletic. So that's an important thing to know too is you can do that. But let's keep that feeding window max 12 hours and it can be somewhere in that 8 to 12 hour range. There is a time of course, when you can work well with doing a little intermittent fasting to add some caloric variability and drop it down to a five to six hour with two meals as well. So here's the deal with this. This is something that you do for a short amount of time to really figure out what works best for you and get yourself on track. I literally have done this on a cruise ship while traveling. I traveled with a food scale and I just asked a lot of questions so that I really got clear on. If I didn't have a scale like what was the protein size, how much are they using in terms of oil? And I did my best guesstimates but man, you know, I went through a cruise, had a great time, ate great, didn't gain any weight purely I think because of tracking. If you're doing this and you get yourself all dialed in and it's fantastic, then you don't have to do it. However, if you get stuck in a plateau, then it's Time to go back in. And if you get stuck in a plateau, I'm going to give you a little tool that you can use too. And you can use the app to do this. You can add into each day a little bit I mentioned this earlier of intermittent fasting, a shortened window, doing something more in the five to six hour period. So you just kick out a meal that will drop your calories right there and cause some caloric variability. But it's not chronic low calories that's gonna drop your metabolism, right? So it works way better and you make sure that you're eating great high protein at those two meals, like 40 to 60 grams at each of them. Now again, you don't have to do this indefinitely. It's just to give you a sense of how things work for you. And it's always this tool in your hip pocket if you need to get back on track. I like to do this with bioimpedance tracking with a weekly waist measurement. Sometimes I'll even throw in some continuous glucose monitoring in there. And remember, you're weighing in daily. You're taking that average of your weight and your average of your body fat so that you can catch it early if things are going in the wrong direction. And go back to tracking. Once you get the hang of tracking your macros, you're going to have to know what to do with that information, right? The best way to see how it's working for you is not by monitoring your weight. You also got to monitor what that weight is made up of. And that means you're going to be using a body composition scale. Now I talk all about this in my next 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 and the best exercise for your ideal body composition. So tune in. 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.

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