JJ Virgin explains why most people are metabolically unhealthy: insulin resistance from processed foods, low muscle, stress, and poor sleep. She maps seven clinical markers that signal the problem, then outlines the fix: eliminate fructose and damaged oils, build muscle, sleep 7-9 hours, and optimize hormones like thyroid and estrogen to unlock fat loss.
All right, first up, what is metabolic health? And now you probably heard these crazy statistics that only 6.8% of the population is truly metabolically healthy. Wow. Here's how you know. Your waist, if you're a woman, is 35 or higher. Your waist as a man, 40 or higher. That is a sign that you are not metabolically healthy. Your blood pressure is higher than 135 over 85, either one of those numbers, right? That or above. Your blood sugar is 100 or above, that's your fasting blood sugar. Your triglycerides are greater than 150, or your HDLs are lower than 50 as a woman, lower than 40 as a man. Now here's one that they don't talk about in terms of metabolic health, but it's actually probably an earlier indicator, is uric acid. Because uric acid, if it's 1% elevated, it, it's an 11% increase in type 2 diabetes. So you're going to want to look at uric acid. And you're also going to want to look at insulin, fasting insulin, where you really want that to be between 2 and 5. Those are actually earlier markers than a lot of this other stuff. But all of these things, what are they telling you? That you are not as insulin sensitive as you want to be, that you are moving into or already are in insulin resistance or prediabetes. And what is that anyway? What is insulin resistance? So insulin resistance is when the cells in your muscles, your fat, and your liver, they just don't hear insulin as well. They don't respond to it well, and because they don't respond to it, that means that then the blood sugar in your blood isn't easily taken up into your cells. As a result, your pancreas goes, "Oh, we need more insulin," so it makes more insulin to get that response, to get your blood sugar to move into your cells. That keeps going, by the way, until your pancreas goes, "Holy smokes, I cannot do it anymore," and that's when we get into type 2 diabetes. How does this happen? A big one, of course, is diet, and especially fructose in the diet. Now, I'm not talking about eating blueberries. I am talking about apple juice. I'm talking about fructose. I'm talking about like agave syrup, high fructose corn syrup. All of those types of things are big, big for insulin resistance, plus ultra-processed foods, damaged oils, you know, basically the opposite of how I teach you to eat. That's the first one. Stress is another one. Stress raises cortisol. Cortisol is catabolic. Cortisol can make you insulin resistant. Another one is low muscle mass. So muscle is one of the first places we can reclaim our insulin sensitivity. Muscle is a glucose sponge. It's a sugar sponge. So it's gonna help have a place for those carbohydrates to land rather than landing in your visceral adipose tissue. Another one is poor sleep. Do you know just one poor night of sleep and you are hungrier and more insulin resistant. This is a cause, a big causal factor for insulin resistance and diabetes is poor sleep. And that means not getting that 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep every single night. Now, fastest way to fix this is going to be diet and exercise. We are going to get into this, but before I also want to talk about, we talked to insulin resistance. It goes hand in hand with something called leptin resistance and leptin resistance. And there's some other things can mess up your hunger regulation. These tend to go along with insulin resistance. And here's the thing. You're hungry, all bets are off. Okay, so what's leptin resistance? If you have leptin resistance, your brain doesn't respond as it normally would to leptin. Now it's constantly stimulated by leptin, but you're not getting the feeling you should, which is that feeling of fullness, of satiety, right? Which means you can't hear it and you just keep overeating even though you should be full. So how does one become leptin resistant? Inflammation causes it. And by the way, the things that cause insulin resistance basically can cause leptin resistance too. And things that you'll see is elevated free fatty acids, you'll see high leptin levels, you'll see big inflammation. We know insulin resistance is associated with what I call weight loss resistance. That's your— you just can't seem to lose the weight. Leptin is as well. Here are a couple other things that you have to look at as you're looking at, okay, I want to lose 20 pounds. I want to make sure that we are doing the right things. And if you've got hypothyroidism, even minor hypothyroidism, this is your metabolic switch. If your thyroid's not working well, it is going to be so darn hard for you to use stored body fat and as fuel and also to build muscle. Remember, muscle is that metabolic sponge for the sugar, right? And it's also metabolic Spanx where it's going to hold everything in tighter and improve insulin sensitivity and boost your metabolism. So thyroid is super key here. Thyroid is also important for sex hormone balance. And if you're heading into menopause, and you're in that storm where estrogen's bouncing up and down and progesterone's lowering and testosterone may or may not be lowering. But estrogen helps you burn fat. Too high, it's problematic. Too low, it's problematic. You want it Goldilocks, right? Just right. And during menopause, it's not. And then after menopause, it drops. Both of those are problematic for being able to build muscle and burn fat. That's why I'm a big fan of bioidentical hormones as you start to go into that to help balance it out all the way through. So that's just one to know. They'll say, oh no, you can totally lose weight doing that? Well, you got to work with your hormones.
