The 5 WORST Fat Loss Mistakes Women Make Over 40 ⚠️

Are you working out consistently, but you're just not getting the results you want? Turns out some of your habits might be doing more harm than good. So I'm gonna help you get over that fitness plateau by sharing 5 big fitness mistakes that you could be making that could be holding you back. Here's the first one. It's not lifting heavy enough. And I get asked all the time, how much should I lift? What's heavy? Whatever is heavy for you. You wanna lift the heaviest weight you can in good form. And remember, your technique, your form is always limiter here. Now, what is the benefit of lifting heavy things? First of all, when you lift heavy things, it's going to help you hold— it's going to put the stress on your bones to help you improve your bone density. And when you have better muscle, you know what you have? You have a better metabolism. When you look at your overall metabolism, the big way you can shift your resting metabolic rate is to put on more muscle. Super important. There was a study in 2002. It was a literature review published in the American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation that found that lifting heavy weights can enhance strength, power, and local muscular endurance and manage health benefits like bone density, insulin sensitivity, and obesity. So here's what we have to blow up. This idea that if you're lifting heavy weights, you're gonna get bulky. Do you know how much you have to lift and how long and how hard you have to lift to really put on muscle? You're lucky if you can put on 1 to 2 pounds of muscle a month. And you know what? If as you building muscle, you go, I'm not sure that I like the way this looks, you can just stop and you won't build any more muscle. The other thing that's important about muscle is think of muscle like your metabolic Spanx. Muscle holds everything in tighter and it boosts your metabolic rate while doing that. So muscle really is the key here, and you wanna make sure that you're doing enough stimulus as you do it. So if you can keep going, doing 20 reps, 30 reps, 40 reps of something, pump the weight up. Ideally work between say 8 and 15 reps, and if you can keep going, get the weight up heavier. If you can't quite get to 5, then let's lighten the load, but let's really start to push the heaviest weight you can handle. And again, the caveat is, in good form. Mistake number 2 is not getting in enough protein. You know I say to eat protein first, and that's because I want to ensure that you're getting what you need. I do have a little hack for you here. The reason that we want to get the protein in is you need the protein for your body to be able to build muscle, and you need enough protein at your meal so that you have the leucine that you need, 2.5 to 3 grams, to trigger muscle protein synthesis. One of the things that I've been doing here to help people because I keep hearing, I can't get the protein in. Well, we do have my 7-Day Eat Protein First Challenge, which is free, and I will put the link in the notes for this. But also, another thing that I think that all of us 40+ should be doing is getting in 1 to 2 servings of essential amino acids a day. There was a study in 2011, another literature review. It was published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. And what they found was essential amino acids are vital for effective exercise recovery, and particularly for women. Research shows that resistance exercise exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis within an hour, and it can remain elevated for as much as 48 hours. And this is super important for anyone 40 plus because we have a diminished response to anabolic stimuli. It's called anabolic resistance. So this can help with counteracting anabolic resistance, muscle wasting, things like sarcopenia. And it's so easy to do. Now again, I still want you eating your protein first and getting in 1 gram per pound of your target Body weight, and I've got my 7-day challenge, which is jjvirgin.com/7day. It's free for you to get started on that. But I am super keen on adding in essential amino acids because think of it like your insurance policy that you're getting what you need. 35, 40 years ago when I was starting out with all of this, I went against the grain. I was like the black sheep over there, and I had people going to the gym. I was focusing on resistance training because I knew that just doing cardio and not doing weights was actually going to be counterproductive because muscle is going to help you lose weight. It's more metabolically costly. We know that when you're building muscle, when you have more muscle, that you give sugar carbohydrates a place to go, and you also become more insulin sensitive. Plus it requires more energy to be on your body. There was a 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis of 58 studies that was published in Sports Medicine that found that resistance training significantly reduced body fat percentage by 1.46%, body fat mass by 0.55 kilograms, that's over a pound, and visceral fat, illustrating that resistance training is highly effective for improving weight loss and body composition. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to do resistance training and you're gonna do your cardio training. In fact, my perfect formula is making sure you're getting in your 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day or more and add some intensity. That's the easy way to do it. Get in that resistance training, right? And get in some high-intensity interval training twice a week. That's my formula for success here. All right, next mistake, focusing on weight loss over fat loss. Now, if I could change things, I would make it so that we never used scales, that we only used body composition scales, that we were always looking not at weight, but what your weight is made up of, because it is such a huge difference. There was a 2008 study that was published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. They found that weight loss diets can lead to muscle loss, with an average of 32% of total weight loss as lean mass. But you could mitigate this with a higher protein intake during caloric restriction to preserve lean mass. Now, you've heard about muscle loss with all the GLP-1 agonists. I contend that it's not the drug, it's the diet. So if we are eating protein first, optimizing that protein, adding in those essential amino acids, and doing resistance training, this does not need to happen. But we need to be monitoring it, tracking it, to know what's going on. And you can't see that from a regular scale. All that's telling you is your weight, not what that weight's made up of. So the way that you can do this at home is get yourself a bioimpedance scale. Now, it's way more accurate to go to a DEXA. And I would highly recommend doing that 1 or 2 times a year, but that's not something you're going to be doing every day. And we want to track your weight, your body composition on the daily, take the average over the week so that we can see the trends. Bioimpedance is going to tell us total body water and it's going to extrapolate how much your body is fat mass, how much of your body is fat-free mass, and then from that, how much is skeletal mass. So we can see the trends for you.. And so if it's not quite accurate compared to DEXA, it's fine. We're looking for the relative change over time. And again, I say over time because your weight's going to bounce every day, but you'll see this change over time. So body composition's a little bit like watching grass grow, but we want to monitor it with a bioimpedance scale. Do not rely on a regular scale. The next one is not prioritizing your recovery. And this is really important for women over 40. There was a study in 2011. It was published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research., and it showed that men and women lose about the same amount of strength right after exercise. For men, it's 74%, women 76%, and felt about the same amount of muscle soreness 2 days later. But women took longer to regain their strength over the next 4 days. So how do you know if you're recovering well or not? Well, there's some very clear signs. Inadequate recovery. The couple things to think about here. HRV. Track your HRV. See what's normal for you. If it's lower than normal, this could be because you're not giving yourself adequate Recovery. If you've got all over fatigue, right? You're not recovering well. If your resting heart rate is elevated, it's higher, 10 beats or more higher than normal. You're not recovering well. Listen to your body here. Don't push it on that day that you might go, you know, everything feels a little achy. I just feel a little bit tired. Maybe that's the day to take a long walk or go do some restorative yoga. And then I'm going to give you a bonus one. I said there were 5 mistakes, but I'm giving you one extra one because this one is such a big deal and one that I'm kind of beating myself up about because why didn't I know about this years years ago. And in fact, I did know about it years ago, but I thought it was for the bros. Back when I was in college and graduate school, I used to take clients to Gold's Gym in Venice, the mecca of bodybuilding, to really show them what was possible when you leaned into resistance training. All the guys there were taking creatine. So I always thought it was a bro dude thing, and I never paid any attention to it. I now know that it is probably the number one supplement for women over 40. It helps with muscle strength, bone health, cognitive health, even skin wrinkles. There's lots of studies out there to support it. I'm going to tell you about a 2021 lit review published in Nutrients journal that found that creatine supplementation offers significant benefits for women over 40, particularly in the context of hormone-related changes. And it turns out that women have 70 to 80% lower endogenous creatine stores compared to men, so supplementation for us is even more important. And what the research shows, that postmenopausal women can experience improvements in skeletal muscle size and function and bone health when they take creatine with resistance training. This isn't gonna happen just by sitting on your couch, right? Obviously. Also, creatine can enhance your mood and cognition because it can help restore brain energy levels. The majority of creatine is in our muscles, but we have a little bit in our brain as well, which is why it's so important for mood and brain. Now, creatine is just one of the amazing supplements that I recommend specifically for us women over 40. So I want you to watch this next video where I'm gonna share the rest of my recommendations to help you build a supplement routine for aging powerfully. Because remember, aging's a privilege, but aging powerfully is a choice.