Transform Your Metabolism: The Mind-Body Connection You Can't Ignore with Ben Azadi

And other places were like, how high up was that last one? They said it was going to be 15 feet.

I know, I know.

Oh shoot. Yeah.

Oh my gosh, Port Tampa, Sarasota, you guys got hit hard this year. Miami's been pretty good the last few years.

It seems like Sarasota is the one though. Sarasota, Fort Myers, it's like they just seem to just like poof.

But for many years it was always Miami, Miami, Miami. Now these storms are coming through the West Coast. I don't know what it is, but Miami's been blessed lately.

Maybe it's the conspiracy theory of removing the weather.

Yeah, could be that. Cloud seeding, right? There's so many conspiracy theories.

We'll see.

We can discuss that in your podcast. Yeah, yeah, no, turn some people off.

All these, like, I just saw this second ago. Really? Do you think politics is helping Yeah, I know.

I've learned my lessons. Like, mentioning any little thing about politics is like, you just, you're not gonna win. So I just stay out of it.

No. Yeah. Yeah, I was just at an event where they had RFK, Jordan Peterson, and Tucker Carlson. And the guy's like, "It's not political." I'm like, "It's automatically political." You know, I'm from Florida. Like, game on, I love them. But, like, you cannot say that that's not political. It's automatically political.

Clinical.

Yeah, come on. All right, okay, looking good. Can you guys just put your drinks on the other side just in case it doesn't interfere with the feed? Sure, sure. Thank you.

How far do you want me from the mic?

I'd say like 2 to 3 inches, and it's also cuz this angle is like the wide angle, so I don't want to get you getting cut off here. So where you are right now. Perfect.

Yeah, like that.

Okay, that works. There's these interviews when we can do them in person, they're just—

I agree, the energy exchange for us and for the listener.

And then knowing, like, you know, when you're on Zoom, it's hard to have a dialogue. It becomes more of a monologue, and it's hard to, you know, get in without cutting off. Yeah, people like, you cut them off. I'm like, oh, it's 20 minutes in.

I was like, yeah, it's so much easier to interject, like back and forth.

Have you ever interviewed Carolyn Leaf?

No, I have not.

Carolyn Leaf, you ask her a question, it's kind of like interviewing Tony Robbins. You ask a question and you really actually need to say nothing else for at least an hour. Wow. I was like trying to interject.

I found out I'm just going to sit Have you ever interviewed somebody with the opposite problem where you expected like a good 5-minute response and it was like 30 seconds?

Oh, I had 5 questions. Yeah, be done in 10 minutes.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh yeah, like those ones you're kind of going, I'm so careful now. And we also, like, the team listens to all of them. I go, if it's not amazing, we're not publishing. Good, good. Yeah, you know, you just have to do that. Yeah, I learned my lesson.

How many have you published so far?

I don't know, tons. I'm doing it a long time, but for a long time I was like, you know, let anybody, any of my friends on, and everybody, and I was like, nope, not anymore. It's like, it doesn't work.

Yeah, you want to grow.

Yeah, well, and they come for a certain reason, so you got to stay in your, your world. So that's it. Okay, I'm ready. I'll do my, um, intro after. Okay, so we will just dive straight on in, and you have, um The freebie that you have is this seed oil card? Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's so hot.

All right, I'll give you a few too.

Okay. Oh, nice. Yeah, I'd love to debunk some of this stuff around the whole metabolic flexibility silliness that people like don't understand. They think you're either completely burning fat or completely correct. Yeah, no, no. So that'll be great. We'll, we'll go into that. Yeah. Fun. All right, Ben Azadi, I got you in person.

We're here in person.

Yay! It's just so much better in person. And I have been wanting to dig into metabolic flexibility. I feel like it's something that people are very confused about and the terms just thrown around. So we're going to talk about that. But before we do, how did you get into all of this?

Yeah, well, first of all, it's an honor. I've been a huge fan and admirer of you for so many years. So thank you for having me.

Go ahead.

It's true. I've studied you for many years, so it's an honor to be here. I got into the space in 2007, I was 23 years old, very young. I was physically obese, 250 pounds, high percent body fat, about 34% body fat, broken, broken. I was actually ready to give up on life. I was going through a bad breakup, and although I was smiling in front of my friends, I would go home, go on the internet, look for ways to end my life. I was that depressed and suicidal. So I explored that, and every time I explored suicide, the first thought that came in my mind was What about your mom?

Thank you, I was just gonna say, but what about my mom?

Yeah, what about your mom was the first thought, and it was a recurring thought. So that was the only reason that stopped me from actually pursuing that. So I knew I had to figure things out, and it really started with a mindset change. I started to get into the books of like Dr. Wayne Dyer and Bob Proctor, and I changed my mindset, started to change my self-image of myself. Then I started to move my body, started to exercise, and I went through this incredible transformation. Where I lost 80 pounds in 9 months, went from 34% body fat to 6% body fat.

In 9 months?

In 9 months, yeah.

You know, I just have to point something out, because you said something that is super important and profound. You said, "I changed my mindset, I changed my image of myself, and then..." Yeah. See, people think it's the opposite. Yeah. And it actually doesn't work the other way, you just get yourself back to where you were again. That's right. So you first changed it in your mind and then you made that shift and that's a quick shift. Mm-hmm. Yes. Of course you were also a little spring chicken.

I was young. Yeah. So it was a lot easier. And I'm a guy so that had that going for me.

Yeah, that too. I, um, although my husband went from 25% body fat to 10% body fat.

Wow.

In 8 months. Wow. At 59.

That's impressive.

So, yes.

That's pretty damn good.

He's a very good student. He finally listened. Alright, so you went through this process, then what happened?

So that's what got me into the health space. I became a personal trainer and eventually opened up a CrossFit gym in Miami, operated that for many years. Yeah, from 2013 to 2018. Sold the shares in 2018 and then I started to just go online, write books, create podcasts, YouTube channel. That's when I came across your work, probably around 2016 or so is when I probably came across your work. But that's what got me into this space. But yeah, it started with the mindset shift. I started with the self-image that I needed to recreate for myself, because my self-image, JJ, was an obese, sad, broke man.

And had you been obese your whole life?

My whole life.

Oh yeah, and, you know, I did this when I was on Dr. Phil, I was doing all these weight loss challenges, but we took on the kids, and I still remember Dr. Phil saying, you know, an obese kid, 70% likelihood they'll be an obese adult. And some of it's the metabolic changes, But a lot of it is just they believe that this is who they are, their identity. I've seen it time and time again in doing weight loss for 40 years is you get people to a certain point and if they don't embody it and get it and they're there in their mind, they just snap back.

They'll find a way to get back to their self-image. That's exactly it. So for me, it wasn't just the obesity, it was the mental obesity, the depression, suicidal thoughts, and I had addictions to drugs and video games and sugar and alcohol. You know, I have a unique thought on addiction and I'd love to share it and kind of get your thoughts on it real quick. I've always been told I have an addictive personality, even like my genetics show you're prone to addiction, and I've always kind of suffered with addictive personality or bad addictions. However, when I started to lose weight and get healthy and get clear on goals and start goal setting and get inspired by that, I feel like I used the addiction as a superpower to transfer into something that was worthwhile for me. Where now, all the energy that I was putting into my addiction, which we put a lot of energy into our addictions, it's like a superpower for me. And as long as I keep setting goals and I keep pursuing those goals, healthy goals, that's turned into a superpower for me.

And see, I absolutely 100% agree with framing anything. You know, people talk, I've got ADD, I go, that can be a superpower. Yeah. You know, bipolar, my son's got bipolar, I go, do you realize that When I lived, you know, worked in Hollywood, every single creative person had bipolar disorder. They all did. You know, you go in a room full of entrepreneurs, everyone's got ADHD. I go, what if these things actually were to benefit you, but we framed them and made them a disease and made them something awful when they might be the greatest thing that could possibly happen?

That's right.

Used the right way. It's like, what is that, with great power comes great responsibility? Spider-Man?

Right, Spider-Man. Wise words from Spider-Man.

Yes. That's what I did.

And I feel like it's a superpower for me now. It's a victim mindset to identify yourself with something that's holding you back.

Yes, well, there are no victims, only volunteers.

That is right. Tony Robbins has said that before.

You know, it's so funny, I went deep into mindset training at 30. And I actually moved to— that was when I moved to Florida. And I moved to Florida to learn how to build a successful business, but I didn't know I was going to be learning mindset training, and it was all of listen to Wayne Dyer and all of that stuff. And you realize it just changes everything. And, you know, I think of it in terms of aging now. The study that came out that showed the people who were excited and positive about aging lived 7.5 years longer. Yeah. You know, and then you look around you and you go, everything is infectious. So like you said, with addiction and the negative, everything's infectious. So if you're around healthy people, that's infectious. If you're around people who are whining, complaining victims, that's infectious. What are you going to magnetize to you, right? So, so now you're 6% body fat, you're a personal trainer, you had a— I had a gym too, very glad I don't have a gym anymore. You had a gym, you sold that, you went online. Yeah. And here you are.

And here I am. Yeah. So, you know, along the way I started to get into keto, intermittent fasting, started a company called Keto Camp, really dominated the keto field, and I learned a lot of lessons, you know, being dogmatic about keto in the beginning.

We're all dogmatic when we start.

Yeah, you're excited and it's like, "Oh, this works, this is the only thing." Everyone must be on this. Exactly, right? So that's a big piece to metabolic flexibility, but it's not the only piece. It's one tool in the shed, and I just love teaching about the metabolism. I mean, the new book, Metabolic Freedom, is all about that. And chapter 10 is all about how to use your thoughts to influence your metabolism and heal your body, which talks about the self-image, it talks about different stories and studies on how people have used their mind to change their health.

Well, I'm a big Dr. Joe Dispenza devotee too, so— I've seen it with my own eyes so many times. All right, well, let's dig into metabolism. First, metabolism. What is metabolism?

It could be really complicated if we want it to be, right? The Greeks define it as transform. So we take a substrate, so that could be protein, carbohydrates, fat, our own body fat, these are all substrates and we transform it into energy. Essentially that's what metabolism is, you take a substrate, transform it into energy. The problem, JJ, is that about 88% to 93% of Americans have taught their metabolism to only burn sugar as the substrate and they're stuck burning sugar. And only sugar, and there's nothing wrong with burning sugar unless you're only burning sugar all the time. It's gonna age you faster, it's gonna lead to insulin resistance and diabetes, so the goal is to teach your metabolism to use whatever substrate is available. That could be carbohydrates and sugar, that's great. For most people, they have forgotten how to burn fat and use ketones. They're essentially in a keto deficiency, so that's usually the first step of what I teach people is to get them fat adapted, teach their metabolism to burn fat instead of sugar. We're designed to burn fat. Babies that are born into this world and breastfed are actually in a state of ketosis. They go in and out of ketosis. Breast milk has saturated fat, cholesterol, and there is some sugar, but it naturally burns that and goes in and out. But we get off the breast milk, we start eating a standard American diet, and we're stuck burning sugar for the rest of our lives. So the first step is to teach the metabolism to burn fat.

And we don't have to be stuck, in case you heard that one. Oh no, we're not stuck. Right. Yeah, I look at it as the continuum of being able to burn the right fuel, the most efficient fuel, the most effective fuel. Like right now, we're sitting here, we should be using mainly fat. We're hanging out. But, you know, earlier today I went and did a big workout, and then, and it was funny, I actually wore a CGM for a while to the gym, because I wanted to see how high I could get my blood sugar to go. Of course, the guys over at the company were like, "What are you doing over there?" I go, "I am pushing it really hard, and I'm using the CGM and the Lumen as an indicator, because that's when you should be using more sugar." So it's really, what are we— what's the best fuel for the job, and how much can you shift back and forth? That's when I look at metabolic flexibility. Is that how you would—

That's exactly it. Alright, so what we see now in the keto space, and I lecture at a lot of keto conferences and sometimes, most of the time, other keto speakers don't really love my message because my message is yes, keto, amazing, there's so many amazing benefits and we can dive deep into all that, but it's not what you do forever. You don't stay in continuous ketosis. It's about going in and out. So in the keto space, there's a different form of metabolic inflexibility and that's only burning fat and they forgot how to burn sugar. So when they eat carbohydrates, there's this overproduction of insulin and they go hypoglycemic. So that's not metabolic flexibility. Metabolic flexibility, as you mentioned, is being able to burn sugar when you want to or burn fat and go back and forth without any problem.

Yeah, and I look at it and I think of diets as tools, not religions, not dogma. And I have to say that because being in the nutrition space and the fitness space. I mean, it used to be that like the runners would fight with the yoga instructors, and now it's the vegans fighting with the carnivores. And I'm like, what if everybody's right? And what if it's just what's right for you right now? And maybe the thing that's going to heal you and improve you and move you into metabolic flexibility isn't the thing that you need to do long term. Maybe you need to cycle it. So just a different way to think of these things. I think this idea there's one thing that we should be doing. This is obviously silly. This is true. Yes. So someone coming in, because we know that the majority of our population's not metabolically healthy, um, and I just wonder, because as far as I can tell from the stats, they really haven't done a deep dive on this post-pandemic. So I mean, post-pandemic, excluding the GLP-1 people would be interesting to look at and see what's really happened here. But taking someone walking in who's metabolically unhealthy, meaning they are more insulin resistant, so they're having trouble accessing stored fat for fuel, they're really relying on having to use sugar, where would you take them? What would you do?

So the first step is to look at the 3 macronutrients, right? Keep it simple for them. We know it's carbohydrates out of the 3 macronutrients that spike glucose and insulin the most. Of course, processed carbs will spike it more than whole foods carbs, but if a person is insulin resistant, we need to restrict their carbohydrates, at least in the beginning, as we increase protein, one of your favorite macronutrients, and fat, right? We wanna teach that metabolism to switch over to, from burning sugar to burning fat. For most people, they could get away with 50 grams of carbs per day total to make that shift. Now, if somebody's really insulin resistant, maybe type 2 diabetic, they might need to restrict it to under 20 grams of carbs per day. This is just short-term, maybe for 6 to 12 weeks as the metabolism is now getting familiar with burning fat. That's the first step. We do that, we eliminate the snacking, we just do 3 meals a day.

I say, you're a young guy, but I know when snacking came about, because we were raised not to snack, and snacking happened when the whole fat-free thing happened.

The low-fat craze happened.

Oh yeah, in the '80s this whole thing blew up. So '80s, everything became fat-free, and then you were supposed to graze.

And now we're still stuck with that mindset.

Well, and you can still— you can see what happened to our— oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, the— everything went sideways from that moment, from when that whole thing happened. And there was a big influencer, Susan Powter, who lost all this weight eating fat-free and, you know, screaming, stop the insanity. It was I mean, it was actually, you look back, it's like there's so many memes you could do over it. But it created such a mess in the snacking piece of it.

It's a big problem. Yeah.

You know that? I think, did you hear the Satchin Panda thing where we eat like 14 hours a day and like some like every hour or somewhere in between?

Yeah, it's crazy. There's another study that my colleague Dr. Don Klum did where it was a patient population survey. He had hundreds of patients just write down every time they either ate a meal or snacked. Anytime they ate or snacked, and it was on average 17 to 23 times per day. The average person was eating 17 to 23 times per day. They were just grazing, snacking, and of course eating their meals. That's a glucose spike, an insulin spike every single time throughout the day.

It's like, it's not even a spike, you're just keeping it up.

You're keeping it up.

Every chance to go down again.

This is true. Yeah, it's just going.

You're just topping it off and pushing it up and topping it off. That's what I was with the snacking. All right, you ate, your blood sugar came up, your insulin came up, your blood sugar's trying to come down, but the minute it's trying, you eat again. It's like insulin's never coming down, blood sugar's probably never going down, you just kept it all up. And you saw, I think, that there was this study that showed people that even with a 90 fasting blood sugar, 5x the dementia risk. So this is like, yeah, scary stuff.

Can I just add something to that? Here's the crazy thing about just looking at blood sugars, even fasting, post-meal, and A1C, it's the insulin that's going to rise before, right? So there's a study called the Whitehall Study which showed that the average person could have hyperinsulinemia for about 14 years while their blood sugars and A1C look perfect.

Yeah.

But they have insulin resistance.

This makes me nuts. I, so this is how I look at these things. To me, Bone mineral density issues, like, look at your muscle mass. Blood sugar issues, look at your insulin. Like, we're missing the lagging indicator. Like, we're looking way over at bone mineral density, we're looking at fasting blood sugar, when if we just looked at fasting insulin, like, why are we not testing this number?

It's one of the most important tests.

It's crazy.

And it's cheap. Even if your insurance doesn't cover it, it's like $30 or $50. It's very cheap.

We had, way back when, we had this gal, we were doing teenagers on Dr. Phil, and this gal came in and she couldn't lose weight. And she was like 6'5", this poor girl. So she was super tall and obese. And I'm like, did anyone check her fasting insulin? Seemed like an obvious thing to me, which was, it was over 20. And of course, then I got yelled at because I'm not a doctor. I'm like, I didn't say, I didn't diagnose it. I just said, check it, check.

Right.

Like, you know, the mom's like, thank God. But these are things that are cheap. Like fasting insulin, super cheap test.

It's cheap.

It's like that and vitamin D. Insist on them.

Yes. And if it's 22, for example, if this girl was 22, the reference range shows that it's in range at 22. But if you're over 10, you've got insulin resistance.

You want to be in the single digits.

Yeah, exactly. I stay 3 pretty much year round when I test. Test line. So you want to be 2 to 5, 3 to 7, around there. Single digits is the name of the game for fasting insulin.

Yeah, imagine if we had a little thing where we had uric acid, vitamin D, the things, the important things.

That would be cool. There were these at-home uric acid meters that they now banned. You can't use them anymore. They put regulations on it. You can't even prick your finger and check uric acid anymore.

God knows what would you do with that information.

I know, you might get healthy, get off your medication. Oh no!

That's so crazy. Okay, so someone comes in, you take them through this, and I would assume that someone who is putting exercise in, it's just going to make this thing happen so much faster because they can get their insulin sensitivity from their resistance training. And so once you see that shift, and how are you identifying, you know, that they've made this shift? Are you seeing it in ketones? Are you checking blood sugar? Like, what are you doing to know, oh, you you got to where we needed to go. You're able to burn fat for fuel.

Definitely looking at blood glucose and ketones. I like to use the Keto Mojo or any kind of device looking at the—

Tell everyone what a Keto Mojo is.

So Keto Mojo is an at-home device that you use to prick your finger, you draw a little blood, and then you put a strip of, a piece of blood on the strip for glucose, put it into the machine, gives you a reading. Use the same blood for a ketone strip and it gives you a reading. That's a good gauge. I mean, once you hit 0.5, 0.5 or higher on your ketone reading, millimoles per liter, you're burning fat instead of sugar, you're in ketosis. Then we wanna look at your blood sugars. I like looking at postprandial blood sugars as a good metric as well. If I—

'Cause it's functional.

Yeah, exactly, right? Versus just fasting blood sugar, which is great. But I like to look at that. And if we see that start to trend in the right directions, the ketones are rising week by week, the glucose is getting better, especially postprandially, uh, prandially, that means we are seeing a good response. Now we could retest the fasting insulin as well, but typically about 8 to 12 weeks, JJ Virgin, that person is now keto adapted where now their mitochondria are really efficient at using ketones, and we can make a decision if we want to start what I call flexing out of ketosis and going back in at that point.

Okay, so how do you do that, the flex part?

So it'll be different for men versus women, and it's especially diabetes.

We don't care, but the dudes have it easy. Yeah. How about those women?

So women of menstrual years or post-menopause or both?

Basically perimenopause and up. The perimenopause, super fun time. Yes. Try to do any kind of intervention. And then after that, after that's easy.

There's a, there's something called the 5-1-1 rule that I talk about in Metabolic Freedom, and it's a way to use keto flexing. So essentially, It's 5 days out of the week you're doing keto, you're eating keto-friendly meals focused on protein.

And so that's 50 grams of carbs or less?

Yeah, total, exactly.

And you're basically getting that, I would assume, just from non-starchy vegetables?

Yes, that is exactly, that's it. So green leafy vegetables, non-starchy vegetables for 5 days, hitting your protein target, which is 1 gram of protein per pound of your ideal body weight. Then 1 day out of the week, and it depends on the woman here and how much stress she has, but One day out of the week you might perform a 24-hour fast where you just go breakfast to breakfast or lunch to lunch or dinner to dinner. Again, it depends on how much stress that woman has. The final day, which is the second one in the 5-1-1, is a keto flex day where you do not fast. You actually take your total carbs above 150 grams coming from healthy carbohydrates, still hitting your protein requirement, but you're lowering your fat that day. You don't want a high-carb day and a high-fat day. So that's one variation called the 5-1-1 rule of how to practice keto flexing.

And what does that do for someone?

So it helps you maintain metabolic flexibility, it reminds your body that one day that you're getting out of ketosis, it reminds your metabolism there's different fuel sources, there's carbohydrates and sugar, we haven't forgotten how to burn that, let's burn that. It helps to make hormonal conversions, T4 thyroid inactive, T4 to T3, insulin helps with that. Helps to build progesterone and estrogen for ladies who have a menstrual cycle, which of course the week before their period would be a good week to have more of those Flex Days. So just makes hormonal conversions and JJ Virgin prevents or helps you overcome a weight loss plateau, 'cause it reminds your body that you're not in a famine, you're not in a ketogenic state, which is more like Xtreme Times. There's an abundance of fuel here, burn that for a day and then the next day go back into ketosis, so it reminds the body and the metabolism is not starving.

I love cycling. I like Bill Campbell, who is— I'm such a big fan of the fact that he is doing all this research now on menopausal women.

Smart guy. So awesome. He's here in your area too.

He is, yeah. He came on, came over to the house. So we're doing this podcast live, and my dog has fallen in love with him, and she is like on him. She's on his shoulder. I'm like, sorry, you know. He's like, "It's okay." I'm like, "All right, now I really like you." He's just a good guy. But yeah, his wife started going through menopause, so he's been deep in it, which is fantastic. But the way that he does his diet is he does 5 days on, 2 days maintenance, 5 days on. So he'll caloric restrict and then go into maintenance, which, you know, I'd love to see more studies because I really feel like it would also these things would also help you not have metabolic adaptation you so often see. Of course, having more muscle mass would help too. Absolutely. So someone who's now flexible, they can use all the different fuels, do you keep them on keto or do you let them do whatever feels best to them?

I wouldn't keep them on keto. I mean, they, there could be a portion of the week that they could be in ketosis. Like you mentioned, we're doing a podcast now. We're using a lot of energy and bandwidth. I'm in ketosis, I haven't eaten today, I drove up from Miami, so on a day like this, like, that's a good keto day, right? But on a day that you're training heavy like you did this morning, maybe it's not a good keto day. So you would kind of adjust it according to your lifestyle, but it's important to maintain this metabolic freedom and flexibility by having some keto days, by having some caloric deficit days, and then having some caloric surplus feast days as well. I think that's important.

Yeah, it's funny. Last night we went to Burns Steakhouse. It's one of my girlfriends'— Jomede's birthday. So then we ended up— so Burns has the dessert room. Have you ever been to Burns? I have not. Uh, Burns, for everybody listening, is like the one of the top steakhouses in the country, and they have a dessert room, which we took— every time we'd go to dinner there, we're like, yeah, no, we're not going to the dessert room. Then we had our kids So we took them up, and it's these train— like, they're little— it looks like you're in these high-end train cars and these most ridiculous desserts. So last night we go to dinner, you know, and I love steakhouses because we literally get the same as Bone in New York with mushrooms, and I'm good to go. Um, and then we're like, well, we're going to the dessert room, it's her birthday. And I thought about it later because I was like, I can't even think of the last time I actually had something like this. And it's like, and, and I said to my husband this morning, you know, I never want to be that person who's like, oh no, I cannot have any of these things. I go, isn't the reason we're doing all of these things so that we can occasionally go and eat literally the Elvis sundae? What's that?

Yeah, tell me about that.

JJ's sundae was banana ice cream, peanut butter ice cream, and I don't know what the third one was, with bacon. Wow. Remember that banana peanut butter bacon? Yeah, sandwich.

That's what it's about.

It was based on that. The sandwich made as a sundae. Oh my gosh, that was one of the three desserts. That was one of the—

so American.

Uh, it was hilarious. I'm like, well, of course we have to have the Elvis sundae. Like, of course. But we also— I looked at the whole thing and I go, we probably ate about a third of each of them between four of us. And it's like, all right, you know, I better be able to do those with all that we're doing. And I think that's an important message. I know we're going to talk about some of these things out there like seed oils, but I also have heard people go, "I never go to dinner. I never go out to eat because I don't want to have seed oils." And I go, "I'm making my body resilient so that if occasionally these things come in, I'm not going to like keel over." And I think that's really the point of all of this.

I agree. I enjoy myself too. Sundays are my day for that, by the way. Is my day where I just enjoy myself, I don't restrict myself.

What's that look like? Let's live vicariously through you.

I'll have about 400 to 500 grams of carbs on a Sunday. Wow. So a lot of carbs. I am active on that day, I play a couple hours of basketball with friends every Sunday as well, so I am active, but a lot of white rice, a lot of fruit, sweet potatoes, and ice cream as well. That's what I do, and I have a ton of carbs on that day. But by Monday I'm back into ketosis, right? That's metabolic flexibility.

Yeah, it's funny, we played one game one night, it was like, what's your last meal? No one was allowed to judge, of course, and I said, "Movie popcorn," and everyone judged me. I'm like, "Guys, come on." All right, well, let's dig into some of the myths around ketosis, and I'll throw out one that drives me nuts, is people are like, "Oh, I can eat all this because I'm burning fat." I go, "You're not burning your body fat." You know, if you like load up on fat, you gotta burn that first. So what are some of the things myths that you would love to bust here on this?

The first one is that keto is not even a diet, it's a metabolic process. And a lot of people look at it, keto diet for fat loss, keto diet for fat loss, and it can be one way to use it, but it's more of a metabolic process that's been around forever. All humans have used ketosis, all of our ancestors have used ketosis when there was not food available. Their body needed the ability, their metabolism needed to have that ability to shift to fat burning produce ketones to fuel the brain so they could stay alert, hunt, kill, and stay alive. So it's nothing new about keto, it's just nuanced or new to some people, so that's the first myth I wanna debunk right there. The second one, I like what you just said about the high-fat diet, right? It can be a high-fat diet, and most people do it that way, 'cause when they go on Google and type in, "What are the macronutrients for ketosis?" It's about like 80% fat, 15% protein, protein and 5% carbs, so they think they need to hit that fat percentage, right? And maybe in the beginning, like the first 7 days, that might do well. As you lower carbs, you could introduce a bunch of fat, but to your point, your body needs to burn the calories in the fat that you're consuming before it burns your body fat. So the way I teach it, very similar to what you would teach, is to have lower fat, get the fat that comes with the protein, hit your protein, and keep the carbs under 50 grams so your metabolism is tapping into stored body fat.

Yeah, and it's, I mean, the reality is if you're eating animal protein, you're getting fat. That's right. So, the carbs are the ones that don't come along with fat. Everything in nature that's animal protein has fat with it.

This is true. So there's no need to even track fat. Track your carbs and track your protein. Hit your protein requirement, keep your carbs under 50 grams.

And the other side of that is if you're eating animal protein, protein, and I think you should, you know, choose lean. It's like, get clean, choose lean. Unless you're getting really great clean fish, go for it. And then you're making vegetables, and likely you're using some ghee or olive oil or something. That's right. So when you really get through it, you're like, do you really need to add any fat? I mean, that was when I really started tracking and weighing, I went, oh, I'm good, you know. No, I don't need to sit there with the olive oil bottle upside down on top of my stuff.

Like, that never happened.

Oh yeah, that never Well, I was— Dave's a good friend. I was like, "Make mine really light." I could never handle all the fat in the coffee. It was like, no, too much.

It's a myth. You don't need to do that. Let your body burn its own body fat for its fat source.

Yeah.

Especially if you have extra weight.

So, alright, so any other myths around this?

Another myth is that men and women do it the same, and that's not absolutely true. As you know, men have more of a 24-hour recycling pattern for their hormones. Menstruating women have more of a 28-day pattern and postmenopause are closer to the men with 24-hour recycling pattern. So it's done differently. Ketosis is a stress to the body. It's a beneficial stress, a hormetic stress when done the right way. It stresses your mitochondria to actually create more mitochondria and create more energy. But if you do it too aggressively for too long, then you lose this hormetic curve where the benefits you were getting are now becoming drawbacks. So you don't want to do it for too long. It's a tool, but not the only tool.

And where I've used it in the past has either been to break someone free of insulin resistance or cancer or seizures. Those are like, to me, the 3 big applications.

Oh yeah.

Am I missing any?

No, that's, that works really well. Or, uh, if somebody has a weight loss stall and they want to change things up, be a little bit aggressive for a little bit with ketosis, which is a very low carbohydrate diet, it could work really well for that. Another myth is that all keto fats are created equal. Like, just because something is keto-friendly, it should be healthy, but that is not true. And arguably, with the seed oil thing and the bad fats, more people in the keto space are consuming these bad fats than maybe people outside of the keto space because they're focusing on a high-fat diet. And typically, they're eating a ton of these rancid fats, these seed oils. So, oh boy, yeah, yeah, just because it's keto-friendly doesn't mean it's health-friendly.

I— the whole keto food, ultra-processed food thing reminds me of gluten. So when I first started pulling people off gluten, I remember this one gal came back and she was so pleased with herself because she found all this gluten-free junk food. I was like, why are you eating cupcakes and cookies? We weren't eating these before. Now you found gluten-free ones and you're eating all this garbage. Stop it. And you see the same thing in that it's keto, and you look at it, you're like, what is this? Yeah, it's like, let's dig in. You know, I'd love to hear what you think about seed oils, um, because I kind of— well, let's see what you say, and then I'm gonna— yeah, it's kind of see some of the things I'm thinking about with them. Yeah. So first, tell everyone what they are.

So seed oils are classified also as vegetable oils, also linoleic acid. These are omega-6 fats. I'm going to start by saying that not all seed oils are bad for you. Not all omega-6 fats are bad for you. Actually, healthy seed oils and healthy omega-6 fats are crucial for the cell membrane.

Yeah, they're essential.

They're essential. Yeah. So it's not that all seed oils are bad. Now there are a lot of clips out there, especially with me talking about seed oils, and it's easy to take a clip and interpret that as Ben saying all seed oils are bad, but it's the processed ones that are the bad ones. And the reason why the processed ones are so bad for us is because they're very unstable fats. They're polyunsaturated fats. The word poly, we know, means many. So these polyunsaturated fats contain many double bonds. The more double bonds a fat contains, the more fragile these fats are, the more aggressive they attract Oxygen. So the way they process these oils, as you know, JJ Virgin, they use heat, oxygen, and chemical agents. So they turn these fats rancid, they bottle them up, we use them to fry and cook with, heat them up even more, and they're very unstable. It's like biting into an apple, leaving it on the counter, coming back 5 hours later, it starts to turn brown. That's kind of what's happening to our cells. And the problem as well is they stay in our body for a very long time. Some studies suggest that the linoleic acid in the vegetable oil, the half-life is about 680 days, meaning if we stopped eating them today, about 2 years later they're still in our body fat creating inflammation. And one more point, there's a study called, from Dr. Martin Grootveld, I put this in Metabolic Freedom, where they looked at french fries cooked in vegetable oils. A 5-ounce serving of French fries contains about 20 to 25 French fries, and it produced the same amount of aldehydes, which are cancer-causing, carcinogenic, as 20 to 25 tobacco cigarettes. So essentially, JJ, one French fry fried in vegetable oil is equivalent to one tobacco cigarette smoked.

I don't even know what to say. I've never heard that one before. That's crazy. That's crazy. Well, it's always been my thinking on these seed oils is that, and I'm glad you brought it up that way, these double bonds, it seems like it should be the opposite, but single bonds are the strong ones and double bonds, one can be broken apart. So all of a sudden you've hit it with oxygen, heat, bam, these things break apart and they get oxidized, they become bad, they're rogue. And that really, like if you had a very clean oil that wasn't process like that and you are in the right balance, this could work well. When I say that, like, I think we all should, along with the fasting insulin and the vitamin D, like, do an omega-3 index test. Yeah. Now what's funny, this omega-3 index test is going to look at how much omega-3 you have, and then it's also going to look at your 3:6. And what was interesting for me is I actually you know, they say what, in primal times we were 4:1 of our 6:3, and that is to keep our inflammation in check, in balance. If you have too much one way, like if you're too high on the 6s, you'll be very pro-inflammatory. If you're too high in the 3s, you could be cut and bleed out. So, you know, there's a balance there. I actually was 2:1. I pushed it too much. Wow.

What do you take a lot of fish oil?

A little bit of fish oil. I eat some fish. I eat only grass-fed, grass-finished, no seed. I was like, okay, oopsies. It's rare. Overachiever on that one. But that then would give you a really good indicator. I remember years ago I'd done one and went, oh, where are all these trans fats coming from? But it was because I was eating out at restaurants and not paying attention. That's right. And that I think is where most of us are not at home using canola oil, right? That's right, yeah. Or Mazola or one of these things.

Well, my mom was when I was a kid, but to your point, most people are not.

We had— I remember my aunt, because she had this horrible rheumatoid arthritis, and she used margarine. She— like, everything was margarine and whole wheat bread. Margarine, whole wheat bread.

And I'm like, "Brrr." That's why you have the arthritis.

You know, never using any of the things that we do. It was all of that stuff. It was, you know, Mazola and margarine.

So my mom worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken when I was a kid. It's part of the reason why I was obese. She would bring me home Kentucky Fried Chicken, right? She worked two jobs, did the best she can.

I love Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Yeah, it's really— it tastes really good. Me too. When I was a kid, I loved it, right?

I haven't eaten it since I was a kid, but that was the treat.

Me too. Me too. But there's a story behind this that relates to what you just said. So she would bring me home chicken most nights. Now, some nights she would come home without the chicken. I would be pissed off. I'd say, Mom, where's the chicken? I was looking forward to it.

Where's the chicken?

And here's what she told me. She said she didn't bring it that night because they don't change the oil for 14 days. So they use canola oil or soybean, they use a vegetable oil, they refry that same oil for about 14 days, then it turns so black, then they change it, and that's when she brings me the chicken, when they change it. So 14 days.

Is that still like that, do you think?

Probably. I don't know.

I mean, it must, unless there's some legislation. First of all, Monday is the problem. I know, yeah. Like, these are not high-heat oils. Correct. So, one day's a problem, imagine all of this. I mean, these are not oils you go and cook— it's so funny how they're like, "Don't use coconut oil." Right, right, and that's a saturated fat, no double bonds. Yes, that's what you want.

Yeah.

It won't do this.

Exactly.

So, so what are the challenges then that people will see if they are overeating these acids, oils, it could cause them to gain weight, right?

It creates cellular inflammation. And when your cell membranes are inflamed, you're not going to be able to burn fat as efficiently. Your hormones are not going to be able to do their job. You'll create hormone resistance. Um, it could create just overall inflammation in your body. It could create arthritis, like you mentioned, your aunt, it could create autoimmune. It's going to just raise chronic inflammation. And when you raise chronic inflammation, you will have symptoms depending on your genetics susceptibility. So that could range from a long list of things. And what it does to the brain— I mean, these things are mitochondrial poison. The brain has the highest concentration of mitochondria. So arguably, the brain will probably be impacted the most, JJ. You probably develop brain fog, might lead to dementia, Parkinson's, these brain conditions that are on the rise. So we want to take care of our mitochondria.

I wonder— we'll talk about mitochondria next. I'm just wondering Someone coming in, they do an omega-3 index, they've got higher body fat, they're insulin resistant, they maybe are typical, the typical American I think is 20:1, 6:3, where you want to be 4:1.

That's wild.

And now they're going to lose this. And so part of it I think is really taking out the 6s altogether and really focusing on eating either saturated fat or omega-3s. Omega-3s, especially Omega-3s and MCTs for that time. Because I feel like if you did that and exercised, you could probably change your tissue saturation faster.

You can. You could do that and also the autophagy that you get through exercise or fasting, you want to add fasting, can also help with the recycling as well. So that 680 days might be a lot faster for you.

Could be half that time. And I'm glad, it's one of my pet peeves. Peeves with all the intermittent fasters, like, as if intermittent fasting is the only way to trigger autophagy. And I'm like, I don't know how long it takes to trigger autophagy with intermittent fasting, but I know with exercise, like, it's right there. It's right there. So, I mean, it's predictable, right? It's probably not an on-off switch anyway.

So, right, there's always some form of it, or it's always occurring, but yeah, you could ramp it up with exercise and different degrees of fasting, but not only fasting.

Well, what do you say before we get to mitochondria, because you talked about in your plan that 1-day fast, what do you say about the potential for, and I've kind of, I keep flip-flopping my opinion on this, but losing muscle mass, any issues with that 1 day, you know, with losing some muscle during that time?

I don't think it's an issue if you do it 1 day. Now for those who do OMAD every single day, 1 meal a day, that's a problem. Problem. I know you're not a big fan of that, I'm not either, but if you just threw it in one day of the week, you're going to be in a protein deficiency that day for sure. You're not going to get enough protein in that one meal, you're not going to hit your target, and that's okay to be there for one day. Just make sure you're hitting that protein requirement the rest of the days and you're going to be there. The thing with the muscle mass and fasting, and I've spoken to Dr. Fung about this, Mike Mutzel, there are different studies showing different things, right?

Is it— I know, that's why I've been like, it's so confusing, right?

Is it, is it mostly water? Is it like Is it actual muscle protein?

It seems like it must be the water. Yeah. It must be depleting glycogen.

I think that's kind of where I'm at right now, JJ, because a lot of the studies that show you're losing muscle, they're not looking at what happens when you start to refeed. Like, okay, is it built back up and is it looking better?

Well, they can't really tell.

I know, that's the whole thing.

They can't tell. Are they doing MRIs? They're not doing it. I mean, so how do they really know that it's skeletal muscle? What would make sense is that you're 24-hour fast, You're going to deplete glycogen. Glycogen is going to lose a lot of water, so it's going to look like it's lean mass going. But I think the reality is, first of all, you could do 100 grams of protein in that, that one meal.

You can.

I can do that.

Yeah, and you'll stimulate muscle protein synthesis with just 40 grams.

You could do that. So, um, but if you're doing some resistance training that day too, you'll be fine. And I think that if you're doing some resistance training and you also maybe hit yourself with some essential amino acids as well, we're all good. So I was way more uptight about it. I wouldn't do a multi-day fast, and again, like that OMAD every day, yeah, I don't think that's— too much.

That's—

well, most of us are stressed anyway. Do we need to add another type of stress? Like, you know, my hormetic stress really is much more sauna and cold plunge. Yeah, at this point. So let's flip over to mitochondria.

Oh, before we do, can I just mention the seed oil, uh, thing thing that I have for your audience? Oh yes, yes, yes. So when I go to restaurants, I always tell the server, I've been telling them for years, I'm allergic to these vegetable oils because even fancy restaurants, JJ, you know this, they use these vegetable oils.

I know, but they'll say it's an olive oil blend.

A blend, and you know that's code for— That's code for—

For there's a smidge of olive oil and a bunch of canola oil.

So let me give your audience which are the bad fats when they're processed and then an option for avoiding them at restaurants. So the bad fats are canola, corn, cottonseed oil. Corn oil is called rapeseed oil in the UK, or canola is called rapeseed oil in the UK, excuse me. So those are 3, sunflower, soybean, and safflower, and then rice bran and grapeseed oil. Those are what Dr. Cate Shanahan calls the hateful 8. What we want are saturated fats and monounsaturated fats like you spoke about earlier, so butter, ghee, duck fat, beef tallow, coconut oil, avocado oil, and olive oil if it's organic, not cut, in a dark glass bottle. So at restaurants, I've been telling my students for years, "Do what I do, just tell them you're allergic." They'll talk to the chef, they don't want to get a lawsuit, they're going to listen to you. So I developed a seed oil allergy card where it makes it easy because people feel uncomfortable. Yeah. And I have a whole bunch to give to you, by the way. Where you just show the server the card, they'll take it back to the chef, on the card it shows the bad oils you're allergic to and the healthier swaps. And they're always going to find an option for you. You're going to treat them well, give them a good tip, of course, but That's the way to avoid it. So, seedoilcard.com is where your audience can get it.

I'll put it at JJVirgin.com/metabolicfreedom. Perfect. So, put all your stuff there. Thank you. I love that. I never would have thought of doing that, and a couple of years ago, I had some clients who had a chef, and the chef made a card for when they went to the restaurant, because that was always my thing. Just tell them you're allergic to gluten. Tell them you're allergic.

He did it too.

I love it. Well, and so I never would have thought of it. He did it, but then I forgot again. I can tell you just said that. Yeah, duh, that's such a good point.

I'll give you a bunch.

It's so good.

Yeah.

What a perfect thing.

It works really well.

I'll give it to everyone tonight at the dinner. Yeah. You know, a bunch of people who would love this. So that is fantastic and super smart and way easier to do than people realize. I mean, this is just not that big of a deal.

Yeah. And to your point, if you do so many things right and you take the hit, it's not gonna be that bad. Yeah. Right? There's also the mindset of going into it. Like if you think that meal is going to be inflammatory, your thoughts can create an inflammatory response. If you go into that meal saying, "It's not the healthiest meal, but I'm healthy. I'm going to process that well," then you're going to process it well.

Yeah, hence the Elvis sundae.

Exactly, that you had last night.

I survived the Elvis sundae.

You're still here, JJ.

Well, if we ever do do dessert, I make, I use Catalina Crunch as a crust. Wow. And then I use like very specific ingredients with allulose and make— like, I made a pumpkin, dairy-free pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving with collagen, and it was amazing, right? And so my kids are used to that. Like, they, they don't ever have garbage stuff.

So blessed.

Like, that's what they think is normal.

Yeah, it's— what a blessing.

Yeah, well, they love to cook this way too, so thankfully it rubbed off. You know, people always want to know how to get your kids to eat healthy. I'm like, just eat healthy.

Exactly, be the example.

You know, if you do it, guess what they'll do? Yeah, that's That's what they know. Okay, over to mitochondria. Yeah. So, what is your approach? What are you doing to keep your mitochondria healthy?

I love talking about the mitochondria and learning about it too. In the book, I have some interesting facts about the mitochondria when I started to dig into it.

Well, let's talk a little couple facts about mitochondria.

Yeah, let's talk about a couple facts. Well, here's one fact. We get all of our mitochondria from our mother. So depending on your mother's health could depend on the health of your current mitochondrial state. Um, the cells in the body that are most required for survival are the cells that have the most mitochondria. For example, the brain. There are regions in the brain that could have over 2 million mitochondria in a single cell. The brain is required for thinking, you know, being able to survive, find your, your food. The eyes are also loaded in mitochondria to be able to see your predator. The ovaries are also loaded in mitochondria, the testicles, the heart. These are all very important for survival. There are hundreds of thousands of mitochondria. So that's how important they are. God put them in the cells that are most needed for survival and reproduction. They're bacteria, these little organelles that are really important for not just energy production. I know we learned that in high school biology class, the powerhouse of the cell, but they're also, there's an intelligence to the mitochondria. Or they act like surveillance systems for stressors and threats, right? So we know about Long COVID, for example, people who got exposed to COVID. Now they have symptoms even months or years later. That's a cellular danger response where they already had a high stress bucket. They got the stress of a virus coming in. The mitochondria saw that threat, lowered its energy production. This is why we feel tired when we're sick. The virus went away, but now the mitochondria got stuck in this cell danger response. Dr. Robert Naviaux calls it wartime metabolism. Hmm. So we needed to switch that mitochondria back to peacetime metabolism. And one of the best ways to do that is moving your body, moving your body, walking. I know you're a big fan of walking. Walking is a great way to mildly stress the mitochondria, forcing it to adapt, right? Stress is how you improve mitochondrial health, but it needs to be stress that you adapt to, not just throwing in a cold plunge and a sauna if you've never done it before. You're gonna feel worse and actually do more harm, right? So mild stress, ketosis is a mild stress, walking, and then you start adding in some resistance training. With the more you could add some stressors to the mitochondria, the more it adapts, gets out of this wartime metabolism, starts producing energy, which raises your basal metabolic rate, which by default helps you burn more fat.

Nice. And I think the important thing there is, is too much stress, you'll die. Like, it's the right amount of stress and then you adapt, and then more stress and then you adapt. So it's a process to get there.

That's right. Hormesis, the process of hormesis. You stay in that hormetic curve, which drives me crazy in the biohacking space that we're in, right? Because we hear—

I'm not in the bio—

well, I am in the biohacking space.

I'll identify a couple things I love in the biohacking space, but as I'm always fighting with them going, could we major in the majors before we major in the minors?

Right. And you spoke about that on my podcast and I agree with you. Um, but what drives me crazy, I am in the biohacking space. What drives me crazy is we talk about cold plunging and sauna and PEMF. Uh, first of all, you're correct. Those are not the majors. Those are the minors. They're add-ons to actually after you do all the work, but you ask the average cold plunge coach, whatever they're called, Is there such a thing? I know there's some facilities that have cold plunge coaches. I don't know what their name is, but there is a thing. They're all over Miami. Wow. But you go to this cold plunge clinic, right? And you've never cold plunged, and you ask the coach, how long should I go for? You know what they're going to say? 3 minutes. Every time it's 3 minutes. If you've never cold plunged before, should you do it for 3 minutes?

And what temperature are we talking?

Usually 39 degrees.

No, not for a woman.

Or even a man who's never done it.

You know what I tell a woman? First of all, I was 50, 52. I go, "Get in, get out." That's right. Get in, get out. That's all you're supposed to do.

You're smarter than all the cold plungers.

And I go, "You may like, you know, the whole point is to get in there, shiver, and get out." Yeah. That's all.

Right. Yeah, then if you do too much, you don't adapt. You feel wiped out.

Yeah. Or you totally adapt and then you get no benefits from it.

Or that too.

That's what I was like when we first got our cold plunge. I just started distracting myself. In there and I got myself to the point where I was doing like 12 minutes.

Wow.

And he had it down at like 46. And then I was talking to— you must know Mark Sisson.

Of course. Okay, so Mark— He's down by me.

What are you doing?

Yeah.

Because that's not the point of it.

He's correct.

It's not, you know, but I mean, all the information I was hearing out there is like, more is better. He's like, no, more is not better. And it was so relieving, honestly, because now I'm like—

You don't have to do it.

No, I do too much.

Well, some of the research, and I put this in the book, shows that 11 minutes per week is the ideal range to hit for the mitochondrial uncoupling benefits. Mm-hmm.

And for—

Explain what that is. That means you're helping your mitochondria produce more energy, at the same time lower its free radical production, which is key. Also the beiging of fat to browning of fat, so helping you burn more fat, activating cold shock proteins, which again help the mitochondria. A lot of studies show when you accumulate 11 minutes week at 59°F or less. So it doesn't have to be as cold as 39°F, it could be 58°F, 11 minutes per week. But you don't start there, you work your way there. And I wouldn't do it in one setting.

I would think you're better off to do small settings than one 11-minute one anyway.

I agree, and that's how I do it personally. And I actually like my sauna more than I do the cold plunge.

Who doesn't like their sauna more than their cold plunge? We actually now have two saunas saunas.

Which one do you have?

So we have the big Sunlighten. Yeah, we had one and we had that. We got a bigger one.

Yeah, so the Impulse is the Impulse. Yeah, that's the one I have too.

So we have that one for like 6 or 8 people. Wow, we're tall, right? So, you know, we took up a lot of space in that sauna. So they have that, and then we got one of those Relax, the fast heat ones.

I haven't seen those.

This is— you'll see it tonight. So what— so the the sunlight, and I like to use that one at night. And so we'll watch Netflix in there. So that's kind of my rules for watching Netflix, we'll get in the sauna.

I love it.

And, but, and plus you can do the sauna at any point. It's not going to interfere with your anabolic response to exercise, right?

So.

It's true. But in the morning, what I like to do is 10 minutes to 15 minutes in the quick one, because the quick one, you know how you have to warm up to it? Yes. So the quick one goes immediately up to 180 degrees. And so, and it goes up to your neck. My husband puts a hat on and he puts this thing around his neck. I'm like, I gotta blow out. I'm not, that's not happening. But I do it for 10 to 15 minutes, then I go get in the cold plunge. The cold plunge is right next to it. And sometimes I'll go over and do the red lights, 'cause I have the Juve red lights. I just cannot tell if the red lights are really, like, I can't figure out if these red lights are really doing anything or not. A mystery to me. Do you have any opinion on this?

Well, the research shows it's pretty solid. I do them every day as well.

I know, it's a big challenge. You're like, yeah, I mean, you take creatine, you know you took it. You take like, you know, Mitopure or Qualia NAD+, you're like, I took it, I know, I can feel it. Red lights, I'm like, I don't know.

I think it's more of the cumulative effects, consistent use of it, that you might notice the effects, especially with like skin health. But I put a whole bunch of additional red light in my Sunlight and Impulse. So I have the red light that comes with it and I added a couple more.

I didn't know we could do that.

Yeah, well Sunlight didn't tell me to do it. I did it on my own.

Yeah, okay, well we needed some coaching on that. Yeah, and then we have a hyperbaric in there too.

Oh, that's awesome. So you got quite the setup.

Yeah, you see the setup and then I built a gym upstairs.

So I love it.

It's basically I created a retreat hotel that we come home to.

It's beautiful.

It feels like Retreat Hotel. It's fabulous. Okay, so mitochondria, then red light, um, some hormetic stressors, exercise. Tell me about like what are your exercise recommendations?

Uh, what I do for myself or what I would recommend for— okay, so for myself I do 3 to 4 strength training workouts per week, 30 minutes to 40 minutes each time, and then I play basketball for 2 hours every Sunday. That's my routine. And after my strength training workouts, I just shoot basketball hoops in my driveway for like 20 minutes, and then I get into my sauna. That's usually my routine. And I get about 12,000 to 14,000 steps per day every day. It's my, my goal. So that's what I do, um, in general. I mean, if somebody's brand new, I'll start them off by walking, right? You know this, right? Just get some steps in, increase those steps, add resistance to the steps, and then we start strength training. We could start with one strength training workout per week where we focus on maybe 3 to 4 different sets and different rep ranges for 30 minutes each time and kind of build from there, build up from there. But I think, and I want to hear your input on this, I think 3 to 4 workouts per week is a good sweet spot, about 30 minutes each workout. I see a lot of people do too much and they don't recover, their sleep sacrifices, their HRV drops. So I think 3 to 4 is a good sweet spot, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

It really depends how you're splitting your workouts up. Women recover faster than men do. I think using HRV as a monitor is the great thing. It used to be that we were like, let's check your resting heart rate, and is it higher? And like, you know, how's your grip strength? But we can do it now just by monitoring HRV.

Such a great—

your Oura Ring will go, hey, chill it today. That's right. And so I'm very intuitive when I go and work out. Like today I decided I was gonna do A lot of times I'll split. I'll do upper body pushing and pulling one day and lower body—

That's what I do too.

—hinging one day. And then sometimes I'll do 4 days of that, then I'll go do a big full body thing. Like today I did squats and deadlifts and overhead presses and chest presses and bent-over rows and pull-ups.

Great workout.

I was like, and I really like literally woke up this morning and go, this is what I want to go do. I love it. This is great. So it just depends, because the other side of it is I really want people to get in high-intensity interval training. And so it depends on how they're going to organize it. Like, to me, getting in at least 2 days of resistance training a week, and, you know, if you hit it really hard those 2 days, you did them like every 3rd day, that might be enough. Yeah. You know, so it depends on someone and what they love to do, and how their schedule works, and how hard they want to work out, and then we create it for them based on that.

Smart, and I love the idea of tracking HRV. One of my favorite metrics. I know you do too. You were lecturing about it, on it, on Hack Your Health this year. Such a great metric to track, right? I mean, HRV gives you such a great gauge, not just for exercise, but all the stressors we're applying to ourselves. If you see that thing drop, that's a day for rest and recovery. It's not a day to push yourself, even if you have that schedule.

Schedules in. The interesting thing with it, and I was all freaked out about my HRV because it was reading so low, and I'm like, what the heck? I'm doing every single possible thing that, that I could do, and the only time I'd see it start to go up is like I do a week-long Joe Dispenza retreat. I'm like, well, this is not real life.

Like, you know, got to just hire him to hang out at the house.

Joe. So then I had Molly Maloof on the podcast, and she goes, you know, you have to have to wear the chest strap to get the real number. Yeah, true. Oh, it's like doing a DEXA versus bioimpedance. I go, all right, then I did that, I'm like, oh, it's fine, now I'll just do the relative one and be able to see where things are. But it is, it is a great way to just kind of check in to see where you are and how hard you should push it. Yeah, you know, and not every day is going to be your hardest day.

That's an important thing too. Yeah, I did the continuous HRV strap as well. Give you some good data, right? Yeah, you could like— well, we used to use that way back when.

We used to use for calories, for heart rate. Yeah, no, it was like how we all back in the '80s—

no, I, I remember that with my gym days.

Because when I was in grad school, first of all, here are the things we were told: do not let someone lift weights till they lose the weight. First, dumb, wrong. Wow. Yes. And you must do at least 30 minutes of cardio or don't bother because you have get into your heart rate zone, you're not going to burn any fat. I mean, just dumb stuff. You're not going to burn fat. I'm like, oh my gosh, but we, we were taught this in grad school. That's what we were taught. Wow. And, you know, I realized later, we— my grad school, the research department was all cardio-based. I did strength. I went rogue. I found a different advisor in the biomechanics lab and did strength.

They probably thought you were so weird.

But the cardio ones, everything was 30 minutes. Why? Because you have the person comes in for their— from their class, right? So it's a class, so they have to come in, they have to change, they do their cardio, they're getting their workout. That's all they could do is 30 minutes. So 30 minutes, like you wonder, just like the intermittent fasting 8-hour window was because the research assistant had to be home at a certain time.

Yeah, and then they figured out that that is like the schedule.

Sometimes you look at look at these things and go, "Question it. There might be something better out there, or at least better for you." Good point. Really good point. So, yes, anything that we haven't covered, because I know we've gone all— this is how women interview, we meander through.

I love it. It keeps things fresh. I love it. You're a great interviewer.

Never know where we're going. It's easy.

Well, I can say this. My favorite part about the book is chapter 10, which is the thoughts, how your thoughts influence your metabolism and your health, and I'd love to share a little bit more about that. Yeah, let's go into that. I think that's like the most important piece. In the book I talk about the origin of the placebo effect and the nocebo effect, right? The placebo effect that we all know, a lot of studies are placebo-controlled studies, and it actually started off in World War II. There was a medical unit where a gentleman named Henry Beecher, Dr. Henry Beecher, was working on this medical tent, and all these soldiers were coming into the tent bullet wounds, legs blown off, they were in bad shape. So they were giving morphine. They were administering morphine to calm the soldiers down, transfer them to the hospital in order to save their lives. At one of these medical tents, they ran out of morphine. So the nurse, JJ Virgin, freaked out and said, "Oh my gosh, what do I do? We're out of morphine." So she put salt water, saline solution, in the needles, gave it to Dr. Beecher, said, "Here's more morphine." So he had the belief he had morphine in his head.. And he told the soldiers, I'm giving you morphine. You're going to feel better in a matter of seconds. So he trade— he transferred his belief to the soldiers and most of them survived, right? So the war ended. Harvard studied what the heck happened at that medical tent. That's where the placebo effect started. That's where they started to study the placebo effect, right? Isn't that interesting? Now there's also the nocebo effect. And in the book, I have a story. About this railroad employee, 1960s. He worked at the inside of a refrigerator cart on a railroad station on the train. And he was working late one night and he got locked in the refrigerator cart. It was 11 PM. He was banging on that door. All of his coworkers went home for the night. And he knew nobody was clocking in until the next morning. And he was cold. So he started to write on the wall and document kind of his night. He was really worried about surviving that night because it was cold. He would write at 12 AM, "12 AM, nobody's around, getting colder by the minute. I don't know how I'm going to make it in the morning." Uh-oh. 1 AM, he would write down, "Shivering, still cold. I don't know what I'm gonna do. Nobody's here to save me." 2 AM, "Freezing. I can barely speak." 7 AM rolls around, his coworkers clock in, they open up that refrigerator cart, the guy's dead. Hypothermia. He froze to death. The interesting part about the story— wasn't that cold— was that the temperature apparatus that he was looking at had been broken for days and it never got below 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The nocebo effect— his thoughts created a scenario where his body followed and induced hypothermia, right? So if our thoughts can do that, you better believe our thoughts could heal us. We could— if we use our thoughts in the right direction. We have 60,000 thoughts a day. We could use those thoughts to heal the body. I think the greatest biohack is this, the greatest health tip or biohack, whatever you want to call it. Dr. Bruce Lipton has shown that your thoughts are frequency that communicate with your DNA to produce a protein. If it's a healthy thought, it's an anti-inflammatory protein. If it's a resentful, hateful thought, it's an inflammatory protein where you shrink your telomeres and you age yourself. So if we know our thoughts could do that and we have 60,000 thoughts per day, JJ, that means we have 60,000 opportunities to put the body in the healing state every single day. And I think that is one of the greatest health tips that I've ever discovered. And then in Chapter 10, I talk all about how to do that the right way. Yeah, fantastic.

I think back to, I was working with, this was kind of actually crazy, I was working, helping a doctor who was obese, kind of on the verge of morbidly obese, lose weight. But the bizarre thing was he was a bariatric doctor. So his specialty was weight loss. And I'm helping him lose weight. And he tells me this one thing, he goes, "So I have a technique I use with my patients and if they do this technique, 100% of them are successful." The technique was to take a picture of the body that you would love to have and put your face on it and carry around and use it and hold it and just make it real. Of course, I was begging the question of like, why aren't you doing it? Like, why aren't you doing this? And why wouldn't you just make this mandatory for everybody? You know?

I love that, by the way. I do that.

It's so funny. When I heard that, I'm like, I got Dara Torres. Do you remember who know who she is? No. Dara Torres was like the— like, she became like an Olympic gold medalist swimmer in her 40s, and she had the most ripped abs. She was amazing.

So I was like, stick my face on that, you know? Did you do that really? Yes. I love it.

I was like, let's find— because you also find the body that works with you. Of course. Like, you know, I mean, I'm not going to be the curvy body no matter what I try. Yeah. I mean, athletic body, have been my whole life. That's That's what I have. That's what I want to go after. So I put it on like, you know, Gabby Reese's body or Tara Torres' body, but it makes so much sense. It does.

That's the whole idea of like having a vision board or what I call a goal card. I actually carry it with me. I have my goal card where I have my goals written out in present tense as if it's already accomplished. And every day I read it as if it's already done. I'm feeling what it feels like if it's done. Every morning I look into my vision board, right? I have a, You're gonna like this. On my vision board, I have photos of me sitting across the table from Joe Rogan, right? So it's Photoshop, right? So I'm envisioning being on Joe Rogan, right? It's just a matter of time because our wants and our ex— our wants and desires are in our conscious mind. Our expectations are in our subconscious mind. So we could want all the things we want and desire all the things we desire, but it isn't until you take that in turn it into your subconscious mind, then you start to act that way, perform that way. One of the easiest ways to do that is to look at a visual or affirm it with a goal card or affirmation. It takes that and accelerates the process. I'm a big fan of that process.

Yeah, it's one I've used my whole life.

Have you really? Yeah. I love it. We're on the same page.

Well, since once I discovered it, I did it. I didn't realize I was doing it when I was a teenager. In my 20s. I just did it naturally. And then when I started mentoring with this mindset coach, who I thought was a business coach, but she was a mindset coach, which was more effective. Right. That was one of the key tools she had me do. It's just act as if. Just make it. That's right. Right?

Right? That's what great actors do, that, right? You believe that they're that person. They could piss you off, right? It's like, they're really good. We want to do the same thing and act as if.

So for everybody listening, think of what that just freed you up in terms of possibility. Mm-hmm. Right? It's powerful. Yeah. But the other one with that is quite often when you're making that shift, you have to let go of so many things, which might include people. Yeah. Who hold you in a box and see you a specific way. That's right. Right? Yeah. And they don't see you as this health fit, vibrant, amazing person. Then they don't necessarily want to have you be that person because because then they're gonna have to hold a light to themselves. That's right. Which is something to be aware of as we go through life.

It's so important. When you change, you become a threat to people in your life who are not changing. Yeah. Not only do you have to adapt to the changes, but everybody around you has to adapt to the changes. So if you're going out drinking with them and you're not drinking anymore, they're not gonna like that. They want the old version of you back. Right.

They want to have fun with you. My husband, when I met him, he had most of his, well, all of his friends friends were from high school or college. Wow. And I don't really have any friends from high school or college. All of mine have been in the last 20 years. Oldest friend in this, in this whole space is Mark Sisson. I love him. I love Mark, by the way. Yeah, I mean, who doesn't love Mark? He's just the best. So as he started to step into this whole world and like leave a corporate job and move into entrepreneurship and get super profiled. His friends were the crabs in the crab pot. That's right. Oh my gosh, even at our wedding they were like, we see you changing. I'm like, oh my gosh, let him go, let him go.

Did your husband, like, did that impact him, or did—

oh yeah, I mean, not in a bad way. He just sees it, you know, you see things for what they are. Thank you for showing me who you are. Yeah, exactly. But it's something we something we all do need to be aware of.

It's true. Your environment, because the way that it works, and I'm glad you brought this up, our environment determines the thoughts that we think and our belief system, which determines the steps that we take and our habits, which determine our results and then our destiny. So I talk about changing your thoughts, but it's very difficult to do that if you don't change your environment. You change the environment, it helps you change your thoughts. You surround yourself with people who are on the same page, it's easier to change those thoughts and change your life.

That 30-year-old, my mentor Kay Smith, that'll be my book after the next book. It's my final book. Oh, it'll be around. I just realized, I was like, I have to write this because I realized so many things I say every single day were from this woman, um, who's amazing. But the first thing that she had me do, well, the very first thing she had me do was put rubber bands on my wrist, and anytime I had a limiting belief, I had to snap the rubber band. Crazy. You don't realize what you do all day long. And then that's just like everything you listen to, everything you read, everyone you're around, all of it, all of it shifted. You know, everything at the time, it was all Nightingale-Conant tapes on a Sony Walkman. I love it. I went to Ogmandino and Zig Ziglar, like the whole thing. Major change. And then it just becomes who you are. And you know, you just don't realize there's any other way to think. That's right. You know, you know the story about myself. And that's why my, you know, when my 16-year-old son's lying in a stretcher and the doctor's telling him, telling us he's gonna die, my 15-year-old son's like, "Sounds like he's got like a 0.125% chance he'd make it." You know? That's not zero. Let's take it. Yeah, so I mean this, you just never know the trickle-down effect of this to other people as you just live this life.

It's true.

So I'm thrilled you have that chapter in there. And this book is out when?

May 13th. Your audience can pre-order it. We'll give you a link to put on your page. Yeah. Okay. So May 13th with Hay House. It'll be available at bookstores, Audible. I'm going to narrate it myself.

Oh, good. Yes, you must narrate it.

I will, even though it's a pain in the butt, but I will do it. Have you narrated all your books?

Yes. Oh, well, and when Grant was in the hospital, I was literally in a little thing having to do my— Wow. Like, yeah. So I was like going— whenever anybody whines about it, I go, you can do it.

Respect.

You can do it. Yeah. You know? But— I like when authors narrate. It is my pet peeve. To listen to a book that someone else has done. Like Jason Fung has some Chinese guy, because they're like, well, we'll have another Chinese guy, and it will sound like, it's like it's not him.

It's very different.

You know him. Yeah. You know, and Joe Dispenza had some British guy, I'm like, come on.

Oh, did he? I didn't listen to his, I read his. It's so much better when the author does it. So I'm doing it myself, May 13th, it's called Metabolic Freedom, and everything we spoke about and plus more is in the book. At the end of the book there's a 30-day plan too. Achieve metabolic freedom.

Fabulous. Well, thank you so much. I super appreciate it. We'll put everything at jjvirgin.com/metabolicfreedom, and I'm just glad you're here in person and we get to have a dinner party tonight.

I'm grateful to be on your podcast and to hang out with you tonight. Thank you so much, JJ.

All right. Yes, it got hot in here.

Oh yeah, I was sweating.

I'm sorry, I'm gonna sweat. I got a new polo on, I got a jacket on. You don't have to record the intro, right, JJ? JJ, you have it? Uh, you know what? I usually like to do it after I kind of think about it a bit. So I think I'll do it, yeah, I'll do it after. Okay.

You want to get out of the hot room?

I warned you guys, don't say I didn't tell you.

Oh, I want to take a, I want to post a photo too.

Do you want it in here or out on the wall? On the white wall? We should do one here and