The Truth About Cellulite Every Woman Should Know

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We're with you all the way, Walgreens. 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.

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Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this.

That's why Columbia engineers everything we make.

For anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever. So is there anything you can do about cellulite that doesn't involve plunking down thousands of dollars on expensive treatments that probably don't even work? So here's the deal. You might never be able to be 100% cellulite free, but there are proven strategies that can make a big difference in its appearance and your confidence. So I'm going to give you five key things to work on and stay till the end because I've got some temporary quick fixes too. And bonus points, the bigger long term changes that we're talking about here, they don't just fix cellulite. They also upgrade your overall health. So before we get into those, let's talk first about what cellulite is. You know, you hear the terms, I mean, the terms are gross. Like you hear cottage cheese thighs and orange peel. We've all heard them. What it basically is is this subcutaneous fat that is pushing against the fibrous connective tissues just below your skin and hence that cottage cheesy thing. Turns out that 90% of women have some form of cellulite. And generally you know where it is. Hips, thighs, butt. So why does it happen and why is it happening to us? Come on. So it turns out sex is a huge one. Age is another one. Genetics, lifestyle, and hormones. And I'm going to break down all of these because the strategies to improve it are come from, of course, why it's all happening. So let's first talk about sex. Now, estrogen causes us to lay down more fat in our hips and our thighs and our glutes. And turns out we have more of these things called alpha 2 receptors here that help us do that. So alpha 2 receptors actually block the burning of fat. Also, our fibrous connective tissue patterns are totally different than men, which is why we have that appearance of cellulite. And depending on your ethnicity, we, you may have thinner skin, and that just compounds the issue. Also, as women, we flat out have more essential body fat than men, by the way, 10 to 12% essential fat versus 3 to 5% for guys. So that we have all these fat stores, right, for pregnancy and for nursing. So that's the first one. The second, aging. Yeah, sorry, had to say it. Now, as we age, the collagen fibers break down and Our skin thins. Some of that is because estrogen's going down. Of course, we also lose muscle mass and quite often we have an increase in our fat cell size, our human growth hormone decreases, and also most of the time cortisol and insulin are both going up. All of that together is a disaster for cellulite. It's going to make it worse. Now, if you're sedentary, you're stressed, have hormone imbalances, you're insulin resistant, or you're a smoker, this compounds it even further, further. And then we're going to pile on the genetics. All right, so now that we know what it is and why it's happening, let's talk about what you can do to improve it. So the first one you would figure this one, of course, is to lose excess fat. And you're definitely going to want to lose excess fat, as this just makes it worse. It's not going to solve it to lose it, but it's going to make it worse if you have more fat. Now, I've gone in depth with the exact things I do if I wanted to lose £20, step by step. That addresses this in detail. And I'm going to put the link in the description below. But I'm going to give you a few key points here that'll help. First off, you can shrink your fat cells. And one of the ways you can do that is by doing high intensity interval training. I call this bursting to blast fat. Let's say that you're someone who's a jogger. Well, what you're going to do, and this is super cool, because it's going to take you less time to, as you're going to go out, warm up for a couple minutes and then I want you to go all out for 10 to 30 seconds. And here's the important thing here you are not pacing yourself. It is not better to go longer, it's better to go harder. The faster you can go, I gotta stop, the better. Then you walk it off, get your breath back under control, and then you do it again. And you want to accumulate four to eight total minutes of bursting, but again, likely in about 30 second bursts. Might be 10, might be 20 seconds. But don't go, I'm just going to go hard for eight minutes. No, no, no, no. Go hard, recover. Go hard, recover. Because what happens is you create this huge oxygen debt that your body has to recover from and that means your metabolism's working harder afterwards, but you're also able to burn more fat afterwards. So that's the first thing. The second thing is eating protein first. In the diet world, I always like to look at how do you add before you take away. And the thing you want to add is getting in your protein. So you want to make sure that you're getting 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. I actually did a protein calculator that's@jjvirgin.com protein calculator to tell you exactly what you need in terms of your age, your sex, your activity levels, stress levels, et cetera. So that'll help you because you got to have that protein. First of all, it's more thermic than any of the other macronutrients. But we know just kicking your protein up, you'll kick out some of the carbs and fat, you'll eat less, your body will be better at burning fat, and you need that protein for muscle mass. Super duper important, right? So in order for you to build muscle, you gotta have two things. Number one, you need to have the amino acids from protein to help rebuild your muscles. And number two, you gotta have the stimulus resistance training. Now why resistance training is so important, there's a couple things. Number one, your muscles are your metabolic spanx, they hold everything in tighter. So that's super helpful. And it can improve collagen. So that's the big thing. It's also a sugar sponge. So it gives sugar a place to go. And so you can immediately start to improve insulin sensitivity through that resistance training, also through HIIT training as well. And the other thing that you can do here is you're improving insulin sensitivity. The other thing that will help improve insulin sensitivity, besides doing resistance training and high intensity interval training, is intermittent fasting. Now I view diets as tools, and when I think of intermittent fasting, it's a tool that you want to use for the right thing. That doesn't mean every single day. Like I recently ran into a friend who had decided to do one meal a day and had been doing it for a year. And the reality was she looked like she had aged, she had lost muscle, she looked softer. I was like, this is not working for you. I like to cycle in intermittent fasting for the autophagy and for the improvement insulin sensitivity. This might be something great for you to do, say two days a week. But remember, if we're really working on getting in the protein that you need and building muscle, this isn't a daily thing. You do want to have a short time restricted eating window, probably around 10 hours a day. But ideally if you're really doing more of an intermittent fast of eating for about five to six hours a day, do you know, once or twice a week, Next thing that you're going to want to do here is lower cortisol. Now here's the thing that happens with cortisol, and this is why this is really problematic is cortisol is catabolic. If you are under stress, your body is in flight or fight breakdown mode. It's breaking down muscle, right? It's breaking down tissue. We don't want to be in breakdown. We want to be doing a balance between breaking down and building up. And so one of the things can super help here are finding those things that you can do to help improve cortisol. So what would that look like? Well, turns out high intensity interval training is a great way to do this. So there's one, but also some kind of activity like breath work, sound bowls, meditation that you can do on a consistent basis. Yes, I'm talking every day. Just like we know that we need to take our body to the gym, our physical body, and move it, and we should be moving every single day. It's the same with what we need to do with our nervous system, but because it's not so obvious. Like, you know, if you're going to the gym, you can step on the scale. You see, you put on muscle or you're stronger, but with your nervous system you're like, can you really tell if you meditated? Maybe you're not as crabby that day, but it's harder to tell. You might be able to see it through your hrv, how well you sleep. But I want you to really just make a commitment that just like you're taking your physical body out to move, you're going to take your nervous system and work with it too and find those things that work for you. Again, tapping, breath work, meditation, doesn't matter. Find your bliss, the next one. One of the big important things here is to have really good circulation to get things moving. And part of that is just getting the blood and lymph flowing. Right. And so how do you do that? Well, exercise, of course, is one that's going to improve circulation, but a really great thing for improving circulation and blood. And that lymph flow is dry brushing. Dry brushing is so good and it's so easy to do. All you have to do is have a dry brush. So there's these dry skin brushes, get it on Amazon. And what you're going to want to do is you're going to go from your lower body, long strokes up, and then when you're above your heart, you're going to go down. But this is a great thing to do in the morning before a shower. Super good for getting everything flowing. Another thing that can really help here is foam rolling. One of my birthday presents was this. I kid you not, I was like, who thinks up these things? It's a travel bottle. That's a foam rolling type of thing. It's kind of like an acupressure water bottle. So I can use it for a roller and water, which I thought was super cool because it's killing two birds with one stone. I can foam roll and help get rid of some of the fluid, get that circulation going. But I also have the hydration, which is another key thing here is hydration. And I'm going to even take the hydration a little step farther. Now. If you've listened to any of my videos, you know I'm always harping about hydration. We basically need at least half our body weight in water. And not just water. It can be green tea, it can be coffee every single day, and then extra. Basically about 4 ounces for every 15 minutes of exercise. Right? That's your baseline for that. You can tell if you're doing well, if your pee is clear. That's a little hack. But the other thing you're going to want to do if you are exercising hard, if you live in a hot climate, a humid climate, is you're going to want to also use electrolytes. This is where I use my electroreplenish every day so that I keep a really good balance as well. If you are dehydrated, couple bad things happen. Number one, you raise stress hormones. We already talked about stress hormones being catabolic. We don't want to break things down, right? So that's the first thing. Number two, it's raising stress hormones. It's making you catabolic, but it also makes you store more fat. It actually takes glycogen out of the liver, turns it into fructose, stores it as fat. Remember, we're trying to get rid of fat now, even though that cellulite is not the typical fat that we're talking about with visceral adipose tissue, excess fat's still going to be a problem. So hydration is massively important here. Next one. And this is super cool. And I'll tell you, it was really funny. Literally five years ago, the guys from Joo J O O V said, hey, we're going to gift you this red light. Therapy unit. And it's this big unit, it's like six feet tall, it's four big blocks. And they gave it to me and I didn't use it. Didn't use it, didn't use it. But I've traveled with it. Like I brought it from San Diego to Florida. So it keeps coming with me and ending up in the gym. And I've started to read about all of the amazing things red light therapy can do. Everything from helping heal your thyroid to skin. I was like, holy smokes. So I started to use it. I was like, gosh, thank you guys so much. Sorry it took so long. Now this is an amazing thing to use. Now granted these big ones can be expensive, but now they have so many different home units that are available and there's so many things that red light can do. But I'm going to talk specifically about what it can do here for cellulite. And red light therapy is basically these special lights that go deep into your body. They are working into your mitochondria and causing good chemical reactions, including the instant release of nitric oxide. Now, nitric oxide, when it's released, makes your blood vessels widen and improves circulation. So anywhere the red light's shining on circulation is improving, blood flow's improving and bringing nutrient rich and oxygen rich blood into that area. So this is super duper important. And that can also help mitochondrial function and it improves collagen production. Now what else can we do to improve collagen production? Well, a couple different things. Number one, vitamin C. You gotta have vitamin C for good collagen production. You can also take collagen, which I do every day, but remember, it's collagen. It has to come into your body, break apart and reassemble. So I use collagen. I also use my bone broth, protein shakes, my all in one Shakespeare. Now, bone broth is about 80% collagen, but you really are going to definitely want that vitamin C too. It's key for collagen production. Turns out, though, red light therapy is key for collagen production as well. So red light therapy can stimulate collagen production in the skin. And why is this so important? Okay, so collagen is a protein that plays a key role in maintaining the structure and elasticity of the skin. Remember I talked about, as we age, collagen is declining. And that is part of the reason that you see much more cellulite as you age. While the red light can promote collagen synthesis and that can improve the texture and the firmness of the skin right there where cellulite is. Right? So there's another one. Now, I've been kind of obsessive, I admit it, about creatine. And turns out, like, I always think of creatine for muscle protein synthesis, right? I think we all do. And it also, by the way, creatine is also super key for brain health. I'm giving it to my so traumatic brain injury. Turns out, though, that creatine stimulates collagen and elastin production within your skin cells. So creatine can help build this fiber net that can protect the connective tissue, and it also helps with cellular regeneration and DNA repair. So yet another thing. Now, I talked about intermittent fasting before to improve insulin sensitivity, but intermittent fasting can also help here as well. So it's another big one that can help. The other thing that can help here is something called urolithin A. This is a product from Timeline nutrition called Mitopure that I've been using. That helps your mitochondria go through mitophagy, which basically means your mitochondria, just like your other cells, are breaking down and they have these waste products that can be regenerated. Some will be eliminated and some will be reused, right? And urolithin A helps that process. So super big important thing. Now, big other thing that's important here, of course, is doing anything you can do to reduce inflammation. And red light's a big one for that. I know I'm just red light for the win, but I really honestly can't believe I've had a red light therapy unit for so long and just was like, what am I doing? Why am I not using this? But when I also think of inflammation, there are a lot of things that you can do. First off, one of the key sources of inflammation is when you eat foods that do not work for you. Those high fire, high food intolerance foods. In the virgin diet, that's what I take you through the process of. It turns out that through stress, through pain medications, through gluten, through fructose, there's a lot of different things that can make your gut more permeable than it should be. And when this happens, you can become more reactive to some of the most common food intolerances. What I found in the virgin diet is gluten tends to trigger it, but things like dairy, eggs, soy, corn, peanuts, and of course, sugar creates problems too. Tends to trigger it as well. And if you're eating foods that don't work for you, which you wouldn't know unless you went through the process because the reactions are very low grade, low grade inflammation, low grade reactions, if you are, it can give you low grade inflammation and you won't get rid of that low grade inflammation until you heal your gut and pull those foods that are offending you. So if you haven't done the virgin diet yet, figured out which foods work for you and which foods don't, this is a big push to have you do it. Another really simple way to quickly reduce inflammation is by making an oil change. Our diet, the standard American diet, which is so high in these ultra processed foods, bad seed oils. And bad seed oils can actually make your fat cells more insulin resistant and create more inflammation. Besides the fact they are rich in omega 6s which are more pro inflammatory. Back a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we had a very different fatty acid profile where we had a very low ratio of sixes to threes so that we were in more of a balanced state. Now we are in much more of an inflammatory state. That's just contributing to this problem here. One of the fastest ways to start to fix this is number one, by adding Omega 3s to your diet. Now ideally you're eating good clean wild fish a couple days a week, but that probably isn't enough. And I find most people will benefit from taking a good omega 3 fish oil supplement. I have my omega ultralas 2 grams a day. And then being aware of what you are using in terms of healthy fats. This is why I say you are what you eat. You want to make sure you're having grass fed, grass finished food. You're making sure you're having wild salmon so that you're getting the good healthy omega 3s there. You're getting rid of the seed oils, you're focusing on things like extra virgin olive oil rather than canola oil and you're eating those fish shout out from gooding for really focusing on shifting into more of an anti inflammatory state through making an oil change. The other thing that can help reduce inflammation and you can actually see this if you do a lab test called a highly sensitive C reactive protein hscrp. One of the fastest ways to start lowering that is taking antioxidants super important. So antioxidants are things like curcumin and vitamin C and annattotochotrienols can help reduce that inflammation. One other thing that can be super duper helpful here, well there's actually still more, but one of them is cold plunging. And I've talked About cold plunging. I have a whole video on that if you want to look at it. Now, obviously the very best is if you can get into an ice bath or a cold plunge. We actually invested in one of those and we keep it at about 40 to 46 degrees and we go in for four minutes a couple times a week. Try to do it at least five days a week when I'm home. And the reason it's important is that it activates your shiver response, it boosts your metabolic rate and it helps beige your white fat. So that can be super helpful there. And of course we talked resistance training, improving your muscle tone. Now, couple last important things here. One other one I have to do a shout out for. I always talk about this, but obviously if you're doing the resistance training and you're looking at lowering your stress, you gotta make sure you're also getting good sleep because this is where you're getting the repair. This is where your body's really raising that growth hormone. That was one of the things that started to lower as we aged. It could contribute to the problems here. So these are all of the things that can be helpful. Now. I know I just threw a whole lot of things at you, but here's the thing. Everything that I just talked about that can help with cellulite, guess what else it helps with? It helps with improving your body composition. It helps with reverse aging. I mean, it helps everything. And the big caution here, and this is really important is take a before picture, take it in like the crappy light of like a dressing room at a store. You know how they have those crappy lights and you're like, oh my gosh, really take like that. Because when you're working on improving your cellulite, it is like watching grass grow. Seriously, it takes time to improve and you're going to sit there and go, nothing is happening, right? Nothing's happening. And so you got to make sure that you are just watching your progress by looking at different things, by are you making progress in each of those different parameters here? Because it could take three to six months to really see a shift. Three to six months. But you're going to see some other great stuff shift along the way. Now, while you're doing all these long term fixes, I also have two things that you can do that will help it in the interim. These are way more temporary, but at least you have something. Say if you're going to go somewhere and you're wearing something, you're like, gosh, I really need something. There are Two things that are great quick fixes. One of them is caffeine cream and you'll see this if you like Google cellulite treatments, caffeine cream is definitely one. Why is that? So caffeine's an active compound in like all of these different anti cellulite products because it prevents excessive accumulation of fat in cells and it stimulates fat breakdown. It also can improve and increase the microcirculation of blood in the skin. And where it's helping here is it temporarily tightens the skin. That's what you're really seeing when you're using that caffeine cream is that temporary tightening. Here's the other one that's super simple. Spray tan or bronzer, like one of those things. I mean it's why we look so much better when we go out in the sun and we've got a little tan. Spray tan bronzer can help a ton here. So that's the other easy little hack. I mean, the bottom line is that your skin tells you so much about your overall health. So these strategies are going to help with cellulite. They're going to help support collagen, which is fantastic because that's going to be good for everything overall, right? It's going to be great for hair, skin and nails. It's going to be great for your muscles. And if you want to get glowing, healthy skin for your body and your face, you're going to want to watch this next video on what to eat, when to eat and why for great skin in your 40s, 50s and beyond. You're going to learn more about top skin boosting ingredients to add to your load of smoothies, the best foods to create glowing skin, how coffee and chocolate. Yes, can support skin health. You just got to know which kind to choose, right? And what your gut health has to do with skin appearance and so much more. So check it out.

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