The Truth About Keeping Weight Off (Why Most People Fail!)

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Rated PG. I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, Mom— turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. 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 most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. 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 powerful 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. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Wanna listen to the show ad-free? Head over to subscribe2jj.com. And start your ad-free experience today.

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Losing weight is actually the easy part. Keeping it off is where 80% of people fail. And today I'm going to reveal the science-backed strategies that actually work long term. I'm going to talk about why exercise matters more for maintenance than for weight loss, the number one habit of successful losers, and how to outsmart the metabolic adaptation that happens and also avoid the weight regain. And let's talk first, like, why is keeping weight off so much harder than losing weight in the first place? Doesn't it feel like it should be the exact opposite? But here's the reality: the stats are super grim. Like, within the first year of weight loss, 80% of people will regain the weight, and in the next 3 to 5 years, it's up to 95%. There's an ongoing, actually, research project. It's called the National Weight Control Registry, where they are looking at what it is that people are doing who are able to keep the weight off. Thousands of people that have done this, and success leaves clues, as I like to say. So in order to avoid being a statistic, let's first walk through what's actually going on when you lose the weight. And it turns out there's a phenomenon called adaptive thermogenesis. And what happens is, it's— think of this like your body's built-in metabolic brake pedal. So you lose the weight and your energy expenditure drops. Well, you would expect some of that because some of our resting metabolic rate is directly tied to the size of our body, right? And actually our total daily energy expenditure too. The more you have to move around, the more energy costs. However, it is more than that. It turns out that your resting metabolic rate drops, the calories you burn during your daily energy activity decrease, but also, and both of those could just be because of, you know, smaller body size, but then also the thermic effect of food lowers as well. And this happens more than what you would expect to have happen just with the reduction in body size. So what is going on? Well, it turns out— think about it— our bodies are wired for survival, not for aesthetics. And when you cut calories, when you lose weight, and especially if you do this quickly, your body perceives this as a threat. A threat to the energy stores, and it's going to try to conserve energy. And how is it doing that? Well, one of the things we know that happens is it lowers thyroid function, both T3 and T4. It also is going to drop leptin. Well, if leptin's low, you know what? You're going to be hungry. Ditto with increasing ghrelin, the hunger hormone, that's going to tell you now you're hungry. Think of leptin for satiety, so the higher the leptin, the more satiated you are. And ghrelin's hunger, so the higher the ghrelin, the more hungry you are. So low Low leptin plus high ghrelin is a recipe for feeling super duper hungry, which is what your body is actually trying to make you do. I'll talk about that in a moment. You also downshift your mitochondrial efficiency, which results in you being more tired, less active, which could then decrease your daily energy expenditure by lowering that non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This whole thing means that you are going to maximize your fat storage and reduce your energy expenditure. Think of this as kind of a starvation response, right? And actually, this was played out in real world, um, with The Biggest Loser. I think you probably have heard of this study about metabolic adaptation with The Biggest Losers, where they looked 6 years later to see what had happened. And remember, with The Biggest Losers, they lost on average like 100 pounds. They were on the ranch first, and I was listening to the statistics and it was like crazy. Easy. Like, they were losing 30 pounds, you know, 10 pounds a month type of thing, like big weight loss fast. And then they went off and they came back, and overall, over the year, they lost 100 pounds. The bummer is, 6 years later, most had regained their weight, and some had done something which we're going to talk about called fat overshoot. Here's what really went on: their resting metabolic rate was suppressed an additional 500 calories a day. That is that metabolic adaptation. So when you lose weight, again, your resting metabolic rate should go down a little bit in response to the size of your body, but this is where it goes down way more than it should. Think about you needing 500 calories less a day. Like, you know, so you're hungry to the 500-calorie point and now you can eat 500 calories less a day. Their bodies were actually fighting to regain the fat. And this is actually something called fat overshoot, that when you lose weight, and it's especially tied to losing muscle, And this is the theory with fat overshoot, is that you lose weight and then your body wants to regain the muscle that you lost. And so it forces you to overeat and then you put on more fat than muscle. 'Cause sadly, most of us will lose muscle and fat when we're dieting. And if you're dieting, by the way, if you are not prioritizing protein, eating protein first, getting that 1 gram per pound of target body weight, and if you're not doing resistance training, you can lose anywhere from 25 to 40% of your weight from muscle. Then you come through that and now you're hungry. Remember, the leptin's low, ghrelin's high, your body is pushing you, and you're— you've got metabolic adaptation. Your resting metabolic rate's even lower than it should be. You overeat and you're not exercising, and now you put on even more fat, and you end up worse off than you were in the first place. So, and again, the whole idea is apparently your body's trying to regain that muscle that you lost. And so you could gain back nearly everything in body fat, which means you are worse off than where you started, which is just awful. Because what is going to happen is that it can lower your metabolism. Turns out it can lower your metabolism, your resting metabolic rate, anywhere from 5 to 20% more lower than it should be. And this is especially happening in those diets where you are losing more muscle. That is really impacting it. The most. And one more piece about putting that fat back on: we've got to stop looking just at body fat. Like, my big, my big argument out there is we've got to look at body composition, not weight. That it's not what you weigh, it's what your weight's made up of. But it's not as simple as looking at body fat versus skeletal muscle. You've actually got to look also at where that body fat is located. There's 3 places it can really be. It can be just below your skin, That's where you want it to be, by the way, just below your skin, little cushion, little protection, but really a little extra fuel source for you should you need it. The other two places you don't want it to be are within your muscle and within your viscera, called visceral adipose tissue. And the theory is quite often when you're gaining that fat back, likely one of the big places you're gaining it is more visceral adipose tissue. So think about it, you went on a diet, Your metabolism responded by being on that diet by going lower than it was before the diet, but even lower than it should be. You're hungrier now. You can't get satiated as easily, and now you're overshooting and eating more than you should and gaining more fat. And the net result is at the end of all of this weight regain, it's not just that you gain the weight back, it's that now you've actually shifted your body composition and damaged your metabolism even more. However, we are going to talk about this. This is— all is not, all is not lost here, I promise. All right, when you think about who would be most impacted by this, obviously someone losing weight quickly, losing weight without exercise, without doing resistance training, without optimizing protein, right? Someone who's losing a lot of muscle when they lose weight. And again, that could be anywhere from 25 to 40%. We want that to be as close to zero as possible. Most of the time when you're losing some weight, you're going to lose some lean tissue too, because some of that supports your fat. But you really want to get that as low as possible. Now, if you're morbidly obese, you're going to lose both fat and lean tissue. But our goal is, as we get closer to goal, to hold on to, or better yet, recomp— put on muscle while we're losing fat, which is entirely possible. But here's the important thing, and this is what came out of that National Weight Control Registry: what got you here won't keep you here. You've heard that before, right? What got you to lose weight isn't going to be the same strategy as what will keep the weight off. And what I like to say is that think of diets like tools. And people will ask me all the time, should I do this diet or that diet, or carnivore, or keto, or paleo, or plant, or blah blah blah. And we could just go on and on and on. The reality is, for the weight loss portion of this, we want to make sure that we are maximizing fat loss, minimizing skeletal muscle loss. If anything, getting some skeletal muscle mass on, and then improving different metrics. So what type of diet you're going to use really depends on what health outcomes you're working on. I would do a little bit different diet for you if you were very adrenally stressed and more active than if you were insulin resistant and trying to get more insulin sensitive and have better blood sugar balance. So I would do different diets based on that. But then once we get you to a place where we've healed your metabolism some, we've dropped some of that visceral adipose tissue, issue. We're now holding on to muscle. Maybe at this point now we're starting to really focus on building muscle. We're going to do some shifting. Now, if we could go back in time— because I'm assuming you're listening to this because you've lost the weight, and maybe it was through a GLP-1, maybe it was through caloric restriction, maybe it was through keto, whatever it was— that what we want to look at now, if we were— if we could go back in time, what we'd really want to focus on is losing 0.5 to 1% of your body weight a week, majority of it if not all of it, from fat. You're holding on to them, building muscle as you're doing it. You are eating 1 gram per pound of target body weight of protein. You're doing that resistance training and you're making sure you're moving more all throughout the day. That would be the perfection thing. We're here now. And so let's talk about what the successful losers, the people that have been able to lose the weight and keep it off, have in common. And again, this is because success leaves clues. So wherever you are right now, we can put this into place. And again, remember, you You might use a specific diet to get to this place. Now we've got to look at how is this all going to shift into your new lifestyle that will keep you here. And my goal is, it's never about maintaining. It's that Tony Robbins phrase of constant and never-ending improvement, the CANI. So one of the first things that James Hill talks about in the National Weight Control Registry is that successful losers— I mean, he calls them successful maintainers. It sounds so funny to say successful losers, but successful maintainers have high levels. They maintain high levels of physical activity. In fact, what he found was that 90% of people who were maintaining their weight reported engaging in about 60 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity daily— brisk walking, cycling, aerobics, running. And what he showed, Dr. Hill showed, was that physical activity is even more important for weight maintenance than it is for initial weight loss. Like, basically you need twice the activity Here's what I'll tell you about that. We know that in weight loss, actually, exercise is not that big of a deal for it. I know that sounds crazy, that the biggest thing that's going to make the shift in weight loss initially is going to be changing what's at the end of your fork. Now, I'm going to caveat that and say I don't think anyone should go on a— first of all, I don't— I want us to stop talking about weight loss and start talking about fat loss. And when you do that, we're really trying to heal your metabolism and make a massive shift under the hood. And I don't believe that you should be going on any type of caloric restriction unless you've got your protein where it needs to be and you're doing resistance training. Because I wanna make sure again that we're doing everything to ensure that you're holding onto, or better yet, building muscle. Once you get to where you wanna be, what we wanna do is you don't wanna get into that coasting place where you're just kind of phoning it in, doing the same old thing at the gym. 'Cause here's the reality. My ex-husband pointed this out to me. He goes, "You're not getting any younger." I'm like, Did you have to say that? Anyway, we're not getting any younger here, and so we need to continue. What I've just discovered with aging is that to stay where I want to be requires more work. It's like, what happened here, right? So at 62, to stay where I want to be in terms of my fitness level and lean is more than what I had to do at 40. Guess what? That's the way it works. So one of my favorite things on this, and I was at a conference and someone said, so what would you suggest for people who who have lost the weight and want to keep it off. And I said, you know what I tell you to do? Find fitter friends. And the reason I say to find fitter friends is because, you know, you've heard Jim Rohn, you are the 5 people you hang out with. Well, when you're around people who just are fitter, they go and they, you know, I'll give you a great example. I've got a great girlfriend, a doctor here in Tampa, Dr. Lisa Koch. And for my birthday, she's like, let's go to a yoga class. She was, first of all, we could go for a walk, we could go to a yoga class, we could go get a massage. What would you like to And I go, let's go to a yoga class. Well, this was a surprise to both of us. She did not realize that the yoga class was in fact a Warrior Yoga class. And we walk into this class and thinking we're going to go to like some restorative yoga class and kind of laugh and chat and stuff. No, this was not the class. This class was 100— it was at least 110 degrees in that room. It was probably hotter. She's like, get yourself some weights. I'm like, weights? Anyway, it was yoga where you never stop moving with weights. Warrior yoga. And, uh, but that's what you want. You want friends that are going to push you, make you do different things. I myself will get into a major rut if not— if left to my own devices. So I'm always trying different things, going to different classes, pushing myself. So you got to continue to challenge yourself, because if you're doing the same old thing, you won't actually stay the same, you'll decline. So one of the things that I've also put into that is to constantly increase my NEAT. Again, going with the Tony Robbins Canny, constant, and never-ending improvement. 2 years ago, I was like, okay, I'm going to make sure I get 8,000 steps in a day, every day, no matter what. And then it was 10,000. Now I'm up to 12,000. So I'm like, what do I need to do to just continue to increase that non-exercise activity thermogenesis? How many steps did I take each day? And what we now do is after dinner, we've just made it a point after dinner to get up and go walk after dinner. So after dinner, that's what we do to get our 12,000 steps in a day. And it's, it's easy when we're traveling because we quite often will walk to dinner, do that, which is super fun, or we'll walk a new neighborhood. But after dinner here, the nice thing is I can throw my rucking vest on. So first thing I would say is like, how can you increase NEAT? I would absolutely love you to be doing weights, you know, minimum 2 times a week, but I think 3 or more times a week, like 3 times full body, and then HIIT, high-intensity interval training. 2 times a week. And then throw in different things. Like, I will throw in that restorative yoga class. Mine, it's not restorative yoga, it's hot yoga. It's hard hot yoga. And so throw in something different. I'll also go to these HIIT classes they have at the same place, different studio for the HIIT classes at the yoga place. So what else can you do that will challenge you, that will make you do different things? Right? And then once a week I do some long cardio. My typical day is I get up in the morning and I do a little meditation. Generally I'll do my sauna. Right now my cold plunge is broken, but generally I do contrast therapy. Then I eat breakfast. Then we go to the gym. Sometimes I'll do it opposite if I can, where I go to the gym, then I get in the sauna. Like I got to do that today. And I do that a couple times a week. I alternate it with HIIT training. And then Fridays are yoga when I'm in town. And then one day a week. And then again, after dinner is walk. And then one long, one long thing a week, whatever it is. Sometimes it's the bike, sometimes it's the StairMaster. I like to change it up. And you want to change it up because your body wants to get used to whatever you're doing. In exercise, my very first company in my early 20s was called Progressive Exercise. Oh, I wish I'd bought that website. There was no web at the time. However, because that's what we need to do, we can need to continue to progress, to push more. Remember, if you want to get better at what you're doing, you have to push harder so your body adapts. So you're always progressing, you're always trying new things out. And you know, if you see a warrior yoga class on the schedule, give it a go, but don't say I didn't warn you. Okay, the next thing that successful maintainers all did was they had consistent eating patterns and consistent diet quality. And what they typically did was eat a more low-calorie, low-fat diet with about 24% of the calories from fat. And the consistency really was key. They ate— and, and I've seen this before, that people who tend to maintain their weight tend to eat a kind of boring diet. They eat similar foods, they maintain regular meal patterns throughout the week, they don't eat a bunch of ultra-processed foods, right? So what they're doing— and I interviewed Dr. Ted Naiman on my podcast, and he talks about the protein-to-energy ratio and the satiety index. And, um, I think his next book that I interviewed him on was called Satiety per Calorie. And what he really advocates pretty much the way that I eat. And I think this is the easiest way to eat, is basically protein plus fiber. So, you know, that is the easiest way to do it. Just get some— like today at lunch I had chicken and a ton of vegetables with— this was like a leftover stir-fry— ton of vegetables with some cauliflower rice in there. So just a load of fiber and then some berries. So So think about what you can do where you can get at least 10 grams of fiber at a meal. You can get at least your 30 grams. I would really argue 40 grams is going to be better. Generally, I'm hitting like 50 grams at least at breakfast and dinner, my bumper meals. And today I think I might have gotten 40 grams at lunch, maybe 50. And then a little bit of healthy fat, which I basically get in my animal protein, though I always go with lean sources. And I also get it in the way I cook. So I generally cook with extra virgin olive oil. Sometimes I go a little wild and use a little ghee or I use a little bit of sesame oil. Today I had in my stir-fry some sesame seeds. So, you know, just mix it up a little bit. But what you're really trying to do is get that fiber from the plants and a lot of different colors. Think about the American Gut Health Project, where the goal is to eat 30 different types of plants— herbs count, thankfully— a day— or, I'm sorry, a day— a week. You could do it a day if you do a good green drink. So think about that. So what do you want to do? You want to honestly eat in as much as possible, you know, I travel a lot because of my speaking schedule. Gosh, I think this year— I literally looked at it— I had like 30 or 40 talks this year. So clearly I'm on the road a lot. And when I'm home, I like to eat in. We don't go out a whole lot when we're home. We generally eat in more because then I can control everything. And, you know, no matter what happens when you eat out, you just don't know. You don't know why does it taste so much better when you eat out. I mean, there's a reason. Although when I eat out, we tend to eat pretty clean. We basically eat mushrooms, onions, broccolini, and steak. Which is what we eat when we eat at home too. So kind of creatures of habit. But eat in more, prioritize your protein. It's going to help you feel fuller too. But the other thing I want you to think about, if you are struggling with satiety again because of that fat overshoot concept, right, where all of a sudden your leptin is lowered, your ghrelin's higher— remember a couple things here: protein and fiber slow down stomach emptying and keep that ghrelin suppressed. That's a good thing, that's fabulous. And protein and fiber also help you release some GLP-1. Now, turns out there's two other things that can help here. First one is allulose, and I am a huge fan of RX Sugar. Full disclosure, I actually, um, invested in the company when I learned all about it. I'm like, does that mean you'll send me some free stuff? They occasionally do. Not enough, guys. If you're listening to this, send me more stuff. But I am addicted to a couple things that they have, and here's why you want to use this. When you take allulose, and it's about 10 grams of allulose, um, it will lower the blood sugar response to meal and release GLP-1. So it's helping you become more insulin sensitive, helping release GLP-1. And on the RXSugar website, they've got crazy amounts of research showing this phenomenon, and an incredible medical board too. They've got Dr. Rick Johnson and Dr. Ben Bikman. I've had Rick on the show a couple times. So allulose is amazing, and you can literally do like 10 grams before a meal. You won't be as hungry. You'll be more satiated and you'll lower the blood sugar response to meal. Of course, you can also do that with some air squats, but it does release GLP-1. And then there's another product that I learned about at a medical conference called Kalicurb. This is actually a product that was studied for 10 years, developed in New Zealand, and it raises GLP-1 for a couple of hours. So GLP-1 raises transiently, right, when you eat, like it's, it's short-lived. And And the GLP-1 agonist peptides will keep GLP-1 around, so you're just not as hungry. It takes the edge off, turns a little of the food noise off. Calicurb just basically works to get it up for a couple of hours, so it can be tremendously effective. So if you are having satiety issues, of course, protein plus fiber, try allulose. And allulose, by the way, RX Sugar has these syrups that can— that are amazing in my protein-loaded smoothies. They have these little gummies, so you could just do 2 gummies before for a meal, that's an easy one. They have these little chocolate treats that are about 80 calories, loaded with fiber, that are amazing. They have a resistant starch fiber. They've got a bunch of different options out there that you can use. The biggest one they have, and I've got to do a video on this, is they have a brownie mix that you make in the microwave in 40 seconds that tastes like chocolate lava cake. I kid you not. You're welcome. Okay, so I know this one's controversial, which I find so hilarious that this is controversial, but 80% of the people in this National Weight Control Registry ate breakfast every day. What found is they've associated eating breakfast every day with higher physical activity levels and better appetite regulation. I know I have tried. I tried with intermittent fasting too. I thought, well, I'll just eat, eat like at 11, between 11 and 7. That did not work for me. I've extended my eating window. I eat between like 8 and 6. That works really well for me. I really like eating during the circadian rhythm. But you know, when I look at all of the research It is one of those things that seems to be very clear. Now, this is a most people, not all people. You might be the N of 1 that goes, I feel better when I don't eat breakfast. The majority of people, when they eat breakfast, tend to eat less throughout the day, right? And feel better and have more energy. So I know for me, when I was trying to do the intermittent fasting and I would go to the gym, then come home and eat, my workouts just weren't as good. It just wasn't. I just wasn't as good at working out. So breakfast has always been my favorite meal. Literally, I'd skip dinner before I'd skip breakfast. And so see how you do with that. Here's what's important. They weren't eating donuts or muffins. And by the way, a muffin's a cupcake, just doesn't have frosting, although some of them even do. They're eating protein-rich breakfast. That's where I love my loaded smoothies. Shameless plug, and we will put a link in the show notes for my Loaded Smoothie Cookbook that's got 50 different recipes using my Reignite Wellness protein powders to get you 30 grams or more of protein in the morning. So I'll make a loaded smoothie— protein powder and whatever things I happen to be interested in that day. You know, it's usually some flax or some chia, some flax milk or coconut milk, a little bit of berries or a little half of a frozen banana or some avocado. So, uh, you can sneak in greens. It's a great way to do that. So loaded smoothie is a great one. The other thing you can do is use protein powder and put it into your oatmeal to make protein oatmeal. You can put it in— make protein muffins. You can put it into your yogurt. I like to do my bone broth protein into yogurt to just kick that way up and also get some collagen. So there's a lot of different things you can do there. Or if you're, again, not egg intolerant or not dairy intolerant, you can do eggs, egg whites, right? So think about starting the day with protein and some fiber. Super important. Now the next big controversial one, because like let's just step on into it, is weighing. This seems so crazy to me that weighing is a thing, that this is controversial, but here's what I would tell you. And I know that if— I'm gonna just do a caveat— if this is something that totally triggers you into any kind of orthorexic behaviors, hey, don't do it. But here's what I like to do with this, because what they found in the National Weight Control Registry is that 75% of the people people weighed themselves at least once a week. Most of them were doing it daily. Now, what I've seen from the research is people who weigh themselves daily are better at maintaining their weight than people who aren't. This is what I like to do. I have an Oxaline Pro. I will link it in the show notes. It goes to my phone. I step on the scale, it then reports into my phone and charts it. I don't pay attention to the day by day because my weight always goes up if I did everything right the day before. Like, if I had a great— I slept well, I had a big workout, maybe I got a massage, I ate healthy, and my weight will inevitably be up because it's weird. So I just don't look at it like that. I look at the trend lines, and I want to make sure that my trend— for me now, I'm really in a, uh, let's keep what we got. I actually put on a little bit of muscle recently, which I was super fired up about because because the biggest thing I'd love to do is pack on as much muscle as possible, which at this point, if I could get 4 pounds on a year, would be amazing. However, I did get 2 pounds on, and I got it because I added something new. I know now because I do one thing at a time, and this is what you can do in maintenance. So I added in something called Fortetropin, which I'll link in the show notes, and boom. Anyhow, so weigh yourself, ideally daily. Monitor it weekly, and weekly also do a hip and waist measurement. Super important. And the other one that successful maintainers do is they actually monitor their food intake. They track. And I'll tell you what, a couple years ago when I decided— when I was getting 2 years out from turning 60 and I'm like, you know what, I need to, I need to get fired up about this, I want to be in the best shape of my life for 60— I started tracking my food and I've never stopped. I would have thought, oh, I'll be— I'm not going to keep doing this. So this actually, gosh, I think maybe it was even 3 years ago. It was at least 2 and a half years ago. I've just gotten into the habit of it, and it's super easy because the app— I use Cronometer, and the app knows me, so now it's just like, it's very easy to fill in. It has made it just super easy to, to kind of live my life and stay, stay, you know, consistent. And the other cool thing about it is this: if I wake up and my joints ache, my fingers are swollen, something that says, oh, you ate something that your, your body did not like, it's great because I tracked it on the app so I can see what the heck was going on there, right? So I literally travel with a scale, a bioimpedance scale. Again, you don't want to do your weight, you want to do what your weight's made up of. And I travel with a food scale. It just makes it easy. And if I'm at a restaurant, I ask them how big the portion size is because they all know with protein how big it is, right? So It makes it easy peasy. Am I— is it exactly perfect when I'm at a restaurant? No, but it's close enough. We don't need to be perfect. We're not doing brain surgery. Next habit of the successful maintainers. Now, you've heard that smoking— that sitting is the new smoking. It turns out that successful maintainers spend far less time watching TV than the average American does. 62% watch less than 10 hours a week. I guess the average person now watches more than 10 hours a week of television. Like, wow. And I think we shouldn't really say TV, it should be Instagram, Facebook, you know, all, all the stuff here. So people who were, uh, who've maintained their weight are just more active. And this is what— why I love, love, love using an Oura Ring and tracking my activity. You could use a Whoop, a Garmin, doesn't matter, something, but track how much, how active you are all throughout the and continue to raise your bar, right? So I remember hearing years ago, it's like, don't just raise your ceiling, raise your floor. And that is such a good thing. So I've raised my floor again. My floor was started at 8,000 because that's where the studies were like, this is the minimum effective dose. And then it was 10, now it's 12. It's like I'm just raising my floor. I've also got a walking treadmill in my office, so it's easy for me to move if I'm, you know, on a conference call or whatever. So think about how you can just move more all throughout the day. Now, the other thing I have to put in here, and this, this was not here, but I'm just going to give you this one because it's like so mission critical, is poor sleep. If you are not sleeping well, you have double the risk of regaining your weight. Why is that? Well, poor sleep, a whole bunch of metabolic disasters happen even from just one night of poor sleep. You're more insulin resistant, you're hungrier, so you've elevated ghrelin, you've got insulin resistance, which means you're hungrier and better at storing fat, right? So, and you're not going to want to be as active, so your NEAT's going to go down, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, right? So the whole thing falls apart. Sleep and stress matter. I want you to always think of like stress is really like this silent saboteur, right? Because when you're stressed out, initially you feel good, right? Because because elevated cortisol and adrenaline, it's like, woo! But then it's not good because you've got more cortisol receptors on your belly, you store more belly fat, and your blood sugar starts to go up, and you become more insulin resistant, and you get hungrier. It's just, you know, because your serotonin and dopamine go down. It's just no bueno. And then of course that stress impacts your sleep. So let's just put that into place of, you know, those are, those are key things. Like, if I could go back in time to my younger self, I would have started to really put things in place for stress and sleep way younger. And the only reason I really got them in place was I was teaching for a couple different labs, and one of the lab directors made me take a cortisol test. And I was like, no! So it woke me up. Now, if you're starting to notice that your body fat's going up, and this is why it's so great, you're stepping on a scale. And I'll tell you a little story. During the pandemic, I was on the scale, I got on the scale, kind of clocked in, oh, my weight went up a pound. No biggie, your weight will go up a pound or two one day and then come back down, and you know that. However, this was over the course of a week. It went up a pound, another pound, 2 pounds. Over the course of the week, it went up like 5 pounds and stayed there. And I'm like, what on earth is going on? Well, it turns out that the stress of all that had triggered an autoimmune issue that I have. And fortunately, I was able to figure that one out in real time before it got out of hand. And that's what you really want to do, is if your weight's starting to go up, you want to go what's going on here. And, you know, has something shifted in my physiology and my endocrinology? Did something go on with my thyroid? Am I heading into perimenopause? Um, do I have a gut issue going on? There's a lot of different things, of course, that could come up that could get in the way of you losing weight or cause you to gain weight. Stress, poor sleep, insulin resistance, toxic burden, an injury, an illness. Like, there's a whole— a lot of different things. However, a lot of these things are silent. Like, you know, you would know if you had an injury, but if all of a sudden your thyroid starts to drop, you may not know. But if you're monitoring your body composition, you'll see it. And so you can kind of go back, and the first thing I like to do in that situation is go back to tracking your food and tracking and making sure that you're tracking your food, tracking your activity, and doing all the things you need to do. Roll in what I teach to do in our programs, which is a 5:2 caloric restriction cycling program based on the work of Dr. Bill Campbell. And it is where 5 days a week you do 75% of your, of your total daily expenditure. You lower your calories by 25%. 2 days a week you go to normal and you rotate that. Or you could rotate in a little shorter intermittent fasting because that generally will do the same thing, cut some calories out. So you can do that, make sure you're doing all your movement, make sure you're doing all your exercise, make sure you're doing all your sleep. And if things are still wonky, that's where you want to go work with a functional medicine doc. And by the way, I gotta do a shout out to my buddy Dr. Mark Hyman, who is part of the Function Health team. This is like— I've been giving it to my family. This is what they got for their presents this year was a Function Health membership. It's like $499 a year, and the labs you get are so comprehensive. And what I look at, I go, this would cost me more to go do on own and go to the doctor and have to pay some of the, the ones that aren't covered by insurance than it is just for what they got. So it's highly worth it. We'll put that in the show notes as well. So one final thing here. I think the biggest thing that has to happen in order for you to maintain this, this body composition shift— that's how I really want to think about it, the body composition shift— is that you got to change how you think about yourself, right? If you still see yourself back where you were, you'll start to do the things take you back to being that person. And sometimes it's not you, it's the people around you. I remember I had a client way back when, a super cute nurse. I was getting her to lift heavy weights. This was like 25 years ago. No, this was like 35 years ago. I've been teaching people to lift heavy weights forever. So anyway, she's getting ripped, she looks amazing. Her husband sabotaging her because he's afraid that she's going to get in such great shape and leave. So sometimes it's the people around you, sometimes it's the person inside you. But remember, you know, raise your bar, because whatever you set as your standards for yourself, you become those standards. So you're the person who gets up early to make sure that they get their exercise in. You're the person who leaves that party because they want to make sure that they get the sleep. You're the person who doesn't do all the appetizers at the event because they know that that's just like a truckload of fat and carbs. You're just going to wait till you sit down and eat the main course because you don't need to eat before you eat. Become that person. Think about who, you know, because habits dictate your hormones, dictate your health, right? So just become the person who, who lives like a healthy, lean person, because guess what? If you are, you'll be one. There you have have it. All right, so I made a body composition guide that I think could be super helpful for you, so I'll link that in the show notes as well. And the big thing I want to just emphasize here is that, again, I want you to think past maintenance to constant and never-ending improvement. But it's not a straight line. It never is. You might have a little injury. I've had a little, little issue with my foot I broke when I was 21. It's been pumping. I've had to figure out, work around it. Little things like that are going to happen, but it's really It's really making those decisions every day to live like a healthy, lean person because those little shifts, those little changes, they'll compound. It's just like compounding interest. And again, I'll make sure I do a link to that Body Comp Guide because that can help you as well. And if you found this helpful, then be sure to subscribe to the channel. If you've got a friend who has lost the weight and you— and is worried about keeping it off, share this on over with them? 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 are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jjvirgin.com, and make sure to follow my podcast at subscribetojj.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next episode. Want to listen to the show ad-free? Head over to subscribetojj.com and start your ad-free experience today. Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 Podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.