Try These Simple Daily Habits to Guarantee Fat Loss in 2024

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I'm JJ Virgin PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe and But I'm driven 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 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 to healthy 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. Hey, it's J.J. here. Now, let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting gifts, surprise holiday school things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend. And honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover. You'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time, and that level of clarity could change everything, right? Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code Virgin.

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Well, happy holidays, gifts, holiday decor and more. The holiday road is long. We're with you all the way, Walgreens. Year after year, you probably tried a major diet and lifestyle overhaul only to see your plans fall short of your high expectations and you're back where you started. Guess what? You're making it too complicated. The simple things are often the ones that make the biggest impact. It's the little hinges that swing the big doors. This year we're going to shift your perspective and you'll see it's the everyday, uncomplicated habits that can make all the difference in your fat loss journey. Now, first of all, in order to lose fat, you need to be able to track it and ensure you're actually losing fat while holding onto or building muscle. So how do you do that? In my perfect world, the first thing you would do and you would do this every six months is you'd go get a DEXA body scan. These now are all over the place. Just put it into Google. Local DEXA probably cost about 75 to 100 bucks. What it's going to tell you used to be that we did this for bone density. Now it tells you bone density, but also tells you skeletal muscle and body fat and specifically visceral adipose tissue, the intraorganal fat, which is the one that's really problematic. Then you're going to come home and you will get a bioimpedance scale for home. My favorite is something called an Oxylene Pro. It's about a hundred bucks. You can get a renpho for about 20 bucks. The most important thing, these are not going to be accurate like the dexa, but you are tracking trends over time, so that's what you're using it for. And you're also going to get a tape measure so that you can measure your waist and compare your waist and your hips and your waist to your height. Those are the things we want to look at. You're going to look at a couple things here that you're monitoring and what I want you to do and the reason you're not just doing a DEXA every six months and calling it a Day. The reason you're weighing in every day is you're taking a trend over time to look at your total body water, your body fat, your skeletal muscle and your visceral adipose tissue. So every week we're looking at the average from the week, right? Because your weight's going to fluctuate. And we're going to look at a weekly tape measure for your waist. What we're looking for here is holding onto our building skeletal muscle as you're dropping body fat. And remember, the closer you get to your body fat goal, the slower this is going to go. Otherwise, you try to do this fast, you're going to end up losing skeletal muscle. And if you're losing skeletal muscle, I always say if you're losing weight without losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. So we want to make sure what we're doing here is that we are holding onto or building muscle while we're dropping fat. Okay, with that, let's dive into what you can do to help burn that body fat. And I'm going to take you back to last year. I guess it was two years ago during the pandemic. I finally bit the bullet and started to do meditation. And I started going to Dr. Joe Dispenza's retreats. And I remember the first retreat, week long, 35 hours of meditation. Good thing I didn't know that going in and everyone around me is having these tremendous experiences and I'm sitting there having a like mental battle with myself. And I realized at the time that this was like taking your nervous system to the gym. And I wouldn't go to the gym for a week and expect to be like, fit. That's crazy. So I changed my expectations here too. I decided to go all in for six months. And over the next six months, I made sure that I was meditating every day. And I also went back to two more Dr. Joe retreats. When I go in, I go all in. But here's what was crazy about it. I sat down to dinner with Dr. Joe about six months in I go, you know what's wild here? I haven't changed anything else. The only variable that changed was adding in meditation. Now, this wasn't me doing meditation by doing hiit training. This was me sitting right, doing meditation and I dropped five pounds. Now, I knew the reason behind it, but it's still wild to see how this can happen because what does stress do? Well, gosh, if you're looking to drop body fat and specifically belly fat, the biggest enemy to dropping Fat, besides eating too many calories is cortisol. Because cortisol is going to do a couple different things. Specifically, you have a bunch of receptors around your belly. So we know that cortisol tends to make you lay down more belly fat, especially visceral adipose tissue. But one of the other things that it does is it raises blood sugar. In fact, for years, I always had a higher fasting blood sugar level despite, like, great diet, exercise, everything else. But I always had a fasting blood sugar that would roll around 90. And I was like, what the heck? But it was always stressful. And we know that stress, chronic stress, can increase blood sugar, which is gonna increase your fasting insulin too. And we also know that elevated insulin and elevated cortisol is like the one, two punch for fat storing. Right? The other big challenge with cortisol is that it's catabolic. And when you're trying to build muscle, you're trying to be anabolic. If you build muscle, you're gonna have a better metabolism, you're gonna be more insulin sensitive, you're gonna be better at burning fat. So we want to be f able to shift from catabolic to anabolic. Right. Also, we know that if you've got elevated stress, you're going to lower your hormones and especially that hormone testosterone, also thyroid. And both of those, of course, can impact burning fat. So what do we need to do here? Meditate or breath work or tapping? This is up to you to find your bliss, whatever that could be for you that helps you just bring it down. And one of the ways that you can monitor to see if that's actually working for you is by tracking your HRV. I noticed when I was at Dr. Joe's actual events for a week, my HRV was crazy. The highest it's ever been. Get back into regular life, it's like foomp, it plummets. So I'm using HRV now to really help me. But one of the things I do every single day is wake up, put my eye mask on, turn on Dr. Joe and meditate. So look at what you can incorporate into your life. And I'll tell you, you're probably thinking right now, if you're not doing this, I don't have time. And what I will tell you is this is going to make you much more efficient and effective at every single thing you do besides the fat burning benefit. So that's the first one. The next one is flat out activity. Okay? And we're just going to walk through this and the different things because depending on where you're at, you'll go, oh, I need to add that one. At the very least, the first thing you want to do is just move more. Now, one thing that can really help here is if you can walk after at least one of your meals. Major difference, because it's going to improve digestion and lower the blood sugar response to the meal. So that's one that's totally helpful. But again, just like I'm tracking hrv, you can track how much you're upright, right? You want to stand instead of sit, you want to walk instead of standing. And so start tracking your overall activity, your daily living and just improve that. That's the step one. If you find that you're getting 5,000 steps in a day, go to 6,000, go to 7,000, go to 8,000. That's the step one. The next one is to add in some resistance training. Because when you add in resistance training, that pushes your body to do more than it's used to. So it has to adapt by building skeletal muscle. Your muscle is metabolic Spanx. It's going to hold everything in tighter while supporting a better metabolism. Remember, it takes a lot of energy for your body to go through muscle protein turnover and build that muscle. Muscle is also a sugar sponge. It gives carbohydrates a place to land that's not on your belly, right? It's going to land into your muscles and that's where you want to be. And then the final one is to do high intensity interval training. Now, I love this for cardio training because it's going to help raise growth hormone. It's going to do it with less oxidative stress. It's not going to impact lowering my immune system and it's done quickly so I can get a full blown cardio workout in 20 to 30 minutes. That also is helping my sympathetic nervous system like learn how to manage stress better. It's going to calm things down. So I'm going to go all out and recover. All out and recover. That would be like going out for a walk and then throwing in a sprint for 30 seconds, walk it off. Sprint for 30 seconds, walk it off. Right, so high intensity interval training, next thing in there. So overall move more and then that's your hierarchy. First start looking at all the different ways you can just increase how much you're moving throughout the day and every single thing counts, from fidgeting to standing to taking the stairs. Then add in that resistance training two to four times a week. Then add in HIIT training. Next one Eat protein first. Now, if all you did in your diet, and I am a big, big, big fan of tracking here, if all you did in your diet was add in the right amount of protein for you, and how do you know that? Go to jjvirgin.com seven day use the number seven. That's my seven day eat protein first challenge. But there's a calculator in there to help you figure out how much protein you need. If all you did was change over some of what you were eating in terms of carbs or fat, preferably carb, and put in protein instead. Just that alone, keeping calories the same. If you were eating the amount of calories that kept your weight stable, likely you'll lose a little fat right there. Just because protein's more thermic than carbs or fat are. Takes about 25% of those calories to go through the process of digestion, assimilation, et cetera, but likely you'll end up eating less calories. And again, we want to get into a calorie deficit here to help your body burn fat for fuel. And by eating protein, we make sure that we're holding onto the muscle while we're doing that. Now, the reason you'll likely get into a calorie deficit without even having to focus on it yet is because you are super satiated by protein. It is the most satiating of the macronutrients. I especially love when I can do like a, you know, eat some protein, like some wild salmon. So I get protein, little bit of healthy fat, and then eat a bunch of non starchy vegetables with it and I've got some fiber and I call that the satiety trifecta there. But again, if all we started to do was focus on getting optimal amounts of protein, kick out a little bit of the other, and then we can start to look at going into a calorie deficit. That's going to help you hold onto muscle while you're losing fat. Which brings me to what you have to do in order to do that, you've gotta be weighing and tracking your food. In fact, I would say if you're looking to drop fat, this is really the first place to start. It has been said that we tend to underestimate what we eat by anywhere from 25 to 40%, which is insane. And so when you get back into tracking, and this doesn't mean you have to do this forever, but it's just to get so super clear on what, say, 6 ounces of wild salmon looks like what, half a cup of Wild rice looks like what a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil looks like. So that you can really make sure that you're getting what you need but not overdoing it. Because remember, too much healthy food is unhealthy. Oh, and one more thing about the food diary. The cool thing is if you see something going on, like all of a sudden you step on the scale, we've all done that. And you're like, why is my weight up three pounds overnight? You can go back and go, did I eat something? My body's intolerant to that. I created a low grade inflammatory response. Did I get a big hit of sodium in there? You know, what the heck was going on that made me hold on to that extra weight, you know? Next one, sleep. There was an interesting study. I believe I've got to look this up, but I believe it was out of Washu. But it showed that failure to get the seven to nine hours of sleep that we need each night, quality sleep, right? Even if you're eating right, even if you're exercising, you are set up for obesity. Why is that? Sleep, of course we know, is where we repair. But sleep is mission critical for insulin sensitivity. In fact, just one poor night of sleep, you wake up the next day, you are more insulin resistant. That means your body has to push out more insulin to get your blood sugar lowered and store nutrients. And if your insulin is chronically elevated, it is really hard to use stored fat for fuel. You tend to be hungrier. And we also know that one poor night of sleep, you are hungrier the next day. Your hunger hormones are also elevated. And so think about it now, you're not as good at burning fat and your hunger hormones are elevated. That's a recipe for disaster. Besides the fact you're more tired, you tend to reach for things that are more sugary, more quick hits of energy, you're not going to want to work out as hard. It's a whole snowball going downhill and not down the hill the way you want it to go. So sleep is super duper important. Again, what I like to do with all of these things, I'm big on tracking for that one. I like the Oura ring. And you start to really connect the dots between what is impacting your sleep. You might find, you know, I tell people to stop eating three to four hours before bed. Very least two hours. But ideally it's really more like three to four hours before bed. I remember one night I ended up eating late. Wake up the next morning, sleep was horrible. My oura ring said, looks like you ate late last night so you can see these things in your ring and then you can start to go, okay, I'm not doing that bad habit because look what happens when I do. All right, so let's recap on all this. You're going to weigh and measure. You're going to meditate, you're going to move more, you're going to eat protein first, you're going to keep a food diary, and you're going to get quality sleep. Now if you don't believe that this can be this simple, you should watch this next video where I debunk eight myths about fat loss that may be keeping you stuck.

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 more.

Importantly, that you're built to last.

And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and my website just JJvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetojay.com See you next time.

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