What I'd Do If I Wanted To Lose 10 Lbs, Step-by-Step

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I'm JJ Virgin PhD dropout. Sorry mom turned four time New York Times Best Selling Authority. I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. That's why I created the well beyond 40 podcasts to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full full out at 100. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now@subscribetojay.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Hey JJ, virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. 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 on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal this time, don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virginonarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin.

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Want to lose 10 pounds? Well, here's exactly what I do and it doesn't include starving or spending a ton of time at the gym. I let's make this simple and doable for you. So here's the first important thing. Probably not what you think I'd start with, but it's your why you got to make your why you want to lose those 10 pounds bigger than why it's such a pain to do this stuff right? Because here's the reality. Challenges are going to come up, things are going to get in the way. But when you have a clear vision of what losing this 10 pounds will do for you, then it's going to make it easier for you when those things come up to get them out of the way. And when they do come up, here's the other thing you want to do. You want to have a lifeline for when those tough times come up. A lifeline meaning a coach, a friend, a partner, someone you can say I think I'm going off the rails. And they go, I gotcha. Now the next thing that you want to do is you got to know your starting point, right? You can't go driving off down to, you know, like I'm in Tampa. I couldn't go drive off to the store and set my GPS if I don't know my starting point and my ending point. So you've got to know that starting point and you've got to also set up a real monitoring system. This is a non negotiable, super important because what you measure, monitor you can improve. So what do we need to do? First off, you're going to need to step on the scale. But not just any scale. I want you to get a bioimpedance scale. I will put the link in the show notes for this, but this is what I do every day. I step on the scale every day. It goes to A Bluetooth, little app on my phone and it's going to track my fat free mass and my fat mass. It does this by looking at something called total body water. What I want to make sure of is that if my weight's decreasing, my total body water staying the same or increasing, which means I'm holding onto or building muscle while I'm losing fat. Remember, if you are losing weight but it's muscle, you're making yourself worse, not better. Same with this. If you're losing weight but not losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. So along with tracking your weight every day and taking the average over the week, do not be that person who steps on the scale. Full disclosure, my husband does this where he steps on the scale throughout the day. I'm like, what are you doing? Get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, walk around and then use the scale. And don't get on the scale again because it's going to vary all throughout the day. Right? Do it in the morning, but take the average over the week because you know, one day it might be up a little bit, one day it's down a little bit. It all depends on things like your hydration, constipation, all of that. So you're going to take the average over the week and you're going to make decisions based on that. And you're looking at your weight and your total body water. You want to make sure that as you're losing weight, you're holding on to muscle. The other important thing here is you want to make sure that you once a week check your waist and your hip measurements. Here's what you want to know. You want to make sure that if you're losing weight, you're losing your waist as well. What you want to look at is your waist compared to your hips. For a woman, you want this to be 0.8 or less. For a man, 1.0 or less. And then you also want to look at your waist relative to your height. And your waist should be at least half, if not less of your height in inches. Okay? So that's your waist. Just do that once a week. And by the way, there is a super cool little gadget gadget that you can get. Again, I'll put the link to this in the notes. It's a Bluetooth tape measure. So literally you can do these measurements and it will just track it on your phone so you have a record of all of these things. This is important because you might be watching this happening and going, man, this is going slow because body comp recomping where you're losing fat and holding onto or building muscles. Kind of like watching grass grow. If you're losing weight really quickly, likely you're losing some muscle too. And we don't want to do that. When you think about losing 10 pounds, what you want to think about losing is 1/2 to 1% of your total body weight a week. Okay. It's slow. So if you're weighing in at £150, that means that for you to lose £10 is probably going to take you two months. Done well, right? So that's why we're tracking next step. Let's talk about food. So what I want you to think about here is getting the enemy out of the house. What do I mean? I mean things that are trigger foods for you because too much healthy food's unhealthy. So sure, nuts are healthy, but I still remember the day that I ate a two pound bag of salted nuts. So I don't keep that enemy in the house because I lose my mind with it. Same with salted chunky almond butter. It's like my kryptonite. So if there's things that you know that you lose your mind on that you will just overeat, don't have have them in the house, right. What you want to stock up on are clean protein sources. And that would be things like grass fed and finished beef and Greek style yogurt and eggs and those two of course if you're not intolerant protein powders like my Reignite wellness protein powders. Shameful plug pastured chicken and pork wild seafood. So stock up on that and stock up on great fiber sources. Things like non starchy vegetables and berries and Legum. Because here's what I want you to do. I want you to eat protein first and I want you to eat fiber second. And I want you to eat that way because it's the powerhouse for having great satiety, being not hungry, raising that GLP1 and having steady sustained blood sugar. So you have great energy. And here's why this is so important. Because if you're hungry, all bets are off, right? So when you're eating protein first, we know that you're going to make better food choices overall. We know it's the most satiating of all the protein, carbs and fat and alcohol. And we also know that it's the most thermic protein, fats, carbs and alcohol. It requires 20 to 30% of those calories when you eat protein to Digest and assimilate that protein. Contrast that with basically nothing for fat or alcohol and about 5 to 10% of the calories from carbs. So just in that alone, if you took some of the calories away from carbs and fat and shift them over to protein, you will start to lose some weight. And then you're going to bring in the fiber, onions and mushrooms and asparagus and brussels sprouts and lentils and berries and you're going to fuel your microbiome. Besides slowing down stomach empty, you're fueling your microbiome. And your microbiome can make the difference between losing weight or gaining weight because of the microbial balance in your gut. So feed the good microbes that can help you lose weight and burn fat. Now, how do you know you're doing this? Well, because you're going to be tracking. Remember I talked earlier about you got to measure and monitor. Well, one of the things you got to measure and monitor is your food. And so I love the app cronometer. I'll put a link in the show notes on this. It's free. And what's great about it is it learns you. So you can start to do your favorite foods or favorite food combinations. So it saves a lot of time. But here's the other part of this. It's not just enough to track. You've got to move, measure it appropriately. And that means you've actually got to weigh your food in, not just use a cup or a tablespoon. Weigh your food. And I want you to do this for at least ideally three weeks. And can we agree we can do anything for three weeks. You'll be mind blown what you learn just by this. I will tell you that if all you did was start tracking your food, it's going to make an impact on your health. This was one of the first things my husband did when he lost his 27 pounds of fat. Was tracking and sort of go, oh, I'm like eating a bag of siete chips in the afternoon. Remember I talked about trigger foods. Now along with tracking what you're eating and how much you're eating and hopefully you're eating about an hour or two after you wake up in the morning, letting your body wake up getting your insulin going again and your stop eating three hours before bed. You also want to look at your timing because we know that if you eat too late at night, you're going to hijack your blood sugar in the morning. You're going to be better at storing fat because you've Got insulin low at night, right? This is when you should be digesting and healing or recovering and healing. It shouldn't be like when you're having to focus on digesting the pizza you just ate. So you really want to stop eating like ideally minimally two hours before bed, but three to four better. And then again, let your body wake up in the morning, go out, see the sunlight, push it about an hour or two after you woke up in the morning and kick out those snacks. Eat breakfast, eat lunch, eat dinners, you know, drink a lot of great fluids in between. Green tea, some coffee, some sparkling water, some spring water. And if you want to, you can even narrow that window. My window, my max window for eating is 12 hours. I try to stick with nine to 10 hours and sometimes I'll push it down to eight. The other thing that I want you to track is your movement. Now you'd be surprised at the first thing I'm going to tell you to do. The first thing I want you to do is just track how much you move throughout the day. And I want you to work on getting that up so that you're moving at least 8,000 steps as your minimum, with a goal of raising that floor till you get to about 10 to 12,000 with eight as the minimum. This is part of your non exercise activity and, and non exercise activity. Thermogenesis called NEAT is actually the biggest thing that you can modify to have a really great impact on your overall metabolism. Because our metabolism is made up of, you know, our basic resting metabolic rate, how many calories we would burn if we just sat on the couch, we can impact that the most by adding more muscle onto our body. Then it's the thermic effect of food. We impact that by having more protein and then it's activity, both exercise and non exercise activity thermogenesis. But what tends to happen when we work out is we tend to lower our neat. So if you just start getting really used to moving more all throughout the day, standing rather than sitting, parking farther away, taking the stairs, it will make a big difference over time. The other thing that I want you to do is prioritize your sleep. You know, one poor night of sleep and you are hungrier and you're more insulin resistant. So that means not only are you hungry, you're better at storing fat, not burning it. And plus, if you are going to work out, probably your workouts are not what they should be. So we want to prioritize sleep so that you've got better control of your hunger. You're more insulin sensitive and you've got better energy throughout the day. And since you've got better energy then you can go boost your metabolism with some resistance training that we know is going to impact your resting metabolic rate, more muscle on your body, better basal metabolic rate and more muscle on your body. You're more insulin sensitive, which is hugely important because you need to be insulin sensitive for your body to be able to really burn fat. Well for fuel. The other thing I'd love you to do is add in some high intensity interval training. And I especially love you to think of this in a way of exercise snacks. These are the snacks I do want you to do. There was a recent study that came out that showed that people who did vilpa vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. These are short bursts of exercise, one to two minutes of exercise throughout the day to get to five to 10 minutes of total exercise. They lowered their overall cardiovascular cancer and all cause mortality risk factors by 40 to 50% when they were doing 10 minutes a day of this versus people who didn't in just one to two minute increments. So I love hiit training and I'd love to think of getting this in just throughout the day. So the best way for you to habit stack this is just think every time I eat I'm going to do one to two minutes of something. It could be running up and down the stairs, it could be jumping jacks, it could be air squats, something. What's great about that is it's going to suck the carbohydrates that you just ate into your working muscles and really help with insulin sensitivity and making it that you don't store them as fat, you'll use them. All right, so that's the basics here. Now I know I threw a lot at you, but remember just, just work down the process here. These are all easy things to incorporate into your life. And the other thing I want you to incorporate into your life that we do not do enough about of at all is then to celebrate your win, celebrate your success. Here's the thing, we're looking at this as losing 10 pounds that depending on how much you have to lose with that 1% of weight loss, up to that a week, maybe a month, maybe two months, maybe three months. All along the way you're going to have little indicators of success. Your waist measurements went down, your total body water went up. You're nailing it on how much protein you should be eating throughout the day. You've got in your non starchy vegetables, you're getting great sleep. Celebrate those wins. Celebrate that sense success. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website, JJ virgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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