Why I'm Breaking Up with My Bathroom Scale (And You Should Too)

This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights, and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google account, Google Health app, internet, and Google Health premium subscription. Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes. Works independently of Gemini Apps. Check responses for accuracy.

Expedia and VisitScotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastlines, quiet lochs, and untamed landscapes. Fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land. Come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave. Plan your Scottish escape today at expedia.com/visitscotland. So good, so good, so good.

New markdowns up to 70% off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Stock up and save big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must-haves for summer. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favourite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. Want an ad-free experience? You can now subscribe to my exclusive VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. It's like your daily latte, but better for your health. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you.

Here's how you do it.

Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. 2-7. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review.

Let's keep thriving together.

Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic? A deep-end DJ? A road dog? Or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit redbull.com/brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer.

Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com/studentoffer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms/collegepc.

There's a lot of myths out there about body fat and body composition, and in this video, we're gonna debunk 'em. All body fat is not bad. Here's actually the reality. You are better off having more body fat and more muscle than being lean and under-muscled. Yes, it's true. And in, in women's case— this is not for men— but in women's case, we actually can handle higher levels of body fat and still stay metabolically healthy. Now, I'm saying that, but I'm betting you don't really want to be there. So let's talk about what body fat you need to have and then which you probably want to get rid of. So women have 10 to 15% essential fat on their body. Men only have 3 to 5%, by the way. We have more body fat just to begin with. Then we tend to store more body fat, especially in our younger years because of estrogen, in our thighs and our butt. Now, that's not dangerous fat. Fat becomes problematic when it starts to shift and we start to store more in visceral adipose tissue around our organs. That's the more damaging, metabolically active, problematic fat. So part of whole thing with body fat is where's that body fat located. If you have a lot of fat on your thighs and your bum, not a big deal, but if you've got a lot of visceral adipose tissue, it's a problem. So where should you be? And again, I'm going to focus first on— you want to have more fat-free mass, more skeletal muscle mass, and that's the more important number for you to focus on. But in terms of overall body fat, when I was in grad school, actually when I was in doctoral school, we had a whole semester where all we focused on was body composition, all the different ways that you could test for it and what the ideal ranges were. And what is kind of weird now is that what we were taught back then as the healthy ideals has changed dramatically nowadays. And I liken that to lab testing. You know how in lab testing you're looking at the average lab metrics and they're compared to the general population, who we now know only about 7% are metabolically healthy. Well, if you've got 80% of the population now who's overweight or obese, with more obese than just overweight, how do we really look at what's healthy in terms of body fat and body composition? So first thing I'm going to maintain is that fat-free mass matters the most. Then where that fat is located, that visceral adipose tissue, you want that to be 10% of your overall body fat or less. And you really want that number to be as close to zero as possible. And it actually can be very, very close to zero. Then for your overall body fat, what I was taught for norms for women was that women would be 18 to 22% was ideal, maybe up to 25%. Now I'm hearing that really we can be all the way up to 30% before problems start. But I would still say for us, I think we're better off in that 18 to 25% range as the optimal ideal range. If you're a curvier person, a curvier gal, maybe you're better off at the 25%. If you're more of a lean athletic build, then you're better off at the lower place. But And again, the most important metric there is not going to be body fat. It's that fat-free mass. I am on a mission to get rid of the traditional scale. I think we have done so much metabolic damage to women because we have focused for so long on the wrong thing. We've been watching weight rather than focusing on what that weight is made up of. Here's the reality. If you wanna lose a lot of weight, the best way to do it is to starve yourself and sit on the couch. Because you'll lose a lot of weight, but it'll be a lot of muscle. You've all heard that muscle weighs more than fat, that it's heavier, but it's also denser and holds everything in tighter. So again, if you're really focusing on losing weight and you want to lose weight fast, then you're going to be losing muscle. And we know this to be true, that when you look at most weight loss programs out there, 25 to 40% of what you lose is skeletal muscle, is fat-free mass. Now put that together with the fact that starting around age 30, we can lose up to 1% of our muscle mass a year. The averages 3 to 8% each decade, and that starts to double at age 60. And then you really look at what Dr. Gabrielle Lyon says, which is muscle is the organ of longevity, that muscle is really what we need to live a powerful aging life. The worst thing that you could do is lose muscle. So the most important thing we need to do is use a different way, look at body composition, look at what your weight's made up of rather than just your weight alone, and focus on doing everything you possibly can, not just to hold on to muscle, but to build muscle and then lose body fat, but always think muscle first. So when you stand on traditional scale, you get your weight, but body composition is going to unpack what that weight's made up of. Because just knowing your weight is kind of like just knowing your total cholesterol. It doesn't give you any kind of information. Body composition is going to unpack what that weight is made up of. There's two major components, and then we're going to get a little bit more granular. There is fat mass, and there is everything else known as fat-free mass. Now, in fat mass, we are concerned with overall fat, but we are way more concerned with where that fat is. And again, that visceral adipose tissue being the dangerous fat. At some point, hopefully soon, we'll also be able to look at intramuscular fat. That's that fatty infiltrate in the muscles. Right now, we don't have a way to really see that. So for now, we're looking at overall fat and then your visceral adipose tissue as the big key indicator of a problem. Then What's fat-free mass? Fat-free mass, again, is everything else. It's your organs, it's your bones, it's your muscles, and it's both your smooth and your skeletal muscles. Now, the big thing that we can affect in that category, obviously, is skeletal muscle mass. When we're really watching our fat-free mass index change, our fat-free mass change, what we're really seeing is an improvement in our skeletal muscle mass. When you're doing this at home, you're probably using something called a bioimpedance scale. Now, a bioimpedance scale, what it does is it sends a wave up your body and it checks the resistance to it. That resistance is fat. The more fat, the more resistance. The less fat, the less resistance. And what it's going to do is it's going to give you an estimate of something called your total body water. Now, the more muscle you have, the more total body water you have, because that's where we're going to take water and carbohydrates and store them as glycogen in our muscles. So higher body water, higher skeletal muscle mass. And that is the equation that the, the machine will give you total body water and then make a guesstimate, right, of your skeletal muscle mass. So you may initially, let's say that you step on a scale after doing a very low-carb diet for a week, it might look like you lost muscle because you dehydrated yourself and you lost glycogen in your muscles. So you have to know what you're looking at. You wanna keep your conditions the same when you're doing these things, the same amount of hydration, the same amount of carbohydrates, weighing in at the same time each day, preferably in the morning. You wake up, you go to the bathroom, then you do this. And then what you're going to look at with this bioimpedance machine and the total body water is you're going to look at the trend over time. So you— it's going to bounce each day because again, it's based on hydration. And then what you'll do is you'll look at the end of the week and you'll look at the trend. And what you want to see is you want to see that your total body water is going up and that your weight is going down. If that is happening, that shows that you're holding on to or building muscle while you're losing body fat. And the machine will also tell you, oh, you've lost some body fat. Now it will also give you your visceral adipose tissue, but it's also guessing this. The best way to really identify that is both with the DEXA body scan where it really gives you a picture of where your fat is, right? And where your muscle is and how much muscle you have. And then what you can do at home is you can use a tape measure. And I like to use a Bluetooth tape measure. There's one called Renpho, R-E-N-P-H-O. We'll put the info in in the show notes. And what's cool about this is that it is a Bluetooth feature. It reports to your phone and you can track your trends. All you need to do is once a week do a waist-to-hip ratio. So you can do a waist ratio, a waist measurement, a hip measurement, and then you look at two things. What's my waist-to-height ratio? Because you want your waist to be half of the measurement of your height or less. So if you're 72 inches tall, that means you're 36 inches or less on your waist. And then a waist to hip. And as a woman, you want your waist to hip ratio to be 0.8 or less. And if, if it's a man, 1 or less. So that's the way you can really track that visceral adipose tissue at home is through a simple waist and hip measurement. So muscle changes everything when you really look at your overall health. Number 1, muscle has a dramatic impact on your metabolism. Now it's not dramatic in that you put on a pound of muscle and boom, all these crazy things happen. It's dramatic in the shifts that it can make over time. Muscle is your metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter. And every pound of muscle that you put on means about 10 more calories a day that you're spending through your metabolism. Doesn't sound like much. It totally adds up. Muscle also is a sugar sponge. So when you're eating those carbohydrates, the muscle sucks them in so that they can be stored as fuel for later, known as glycogen. And then muscle is also this cool multitasking messenger where it's— every time it contracts, it gives messages to your body: burn fat, lower inflammation, boost my immune system. So it does all these amazing things, not just for your metabolism but also for your longevity. So the big buzz right now is body recomposition. What does that mean? That means that you are not just losing weight, that you are focusing on holding on to, or better yet, building muscle as you're losing body fat. Now, Here's how you're going to want to think about this because this is a slow process. I will tell you that recomping your body is a little bit like watching grass grow if you're doing this correctly. If you try to do it too fast, you'll end up losing muscle. If you want to recomp your body, basically, you're going to want to think about losing about a half to a percent of weight a week because that's about as much body fat as you'll be able to lose. So slow go on the loss. And again, you're matching this with your impedance machine to watch your total body water to make sure that it is staying the same or going up as you're losing weight. And then for muscle mass, now it's different if you've never lifted weights before because there's this phenomenon called newbie gains where it's a little easier for you to put on muscle as you start. But if you've been lifting weights for a while, you know, a half pound to a pound of muscle a month would be really, really good. I've got some tricks up my sleeve to help you get more and I'll share those in a moment, but that's where you want to think of. I will tell you that my husband was able to drop 27 pounds of fat and put on 24 pounds of muscle in 8 months. But we did that by optimizing his testosterone, cranking up his protein, making sure he was taking his, his— he takes chiotine, right? We just cover the S. It's his chiotine, his creatine HCL with taurine and magnesium. So we did all the things that would help him really optimize, and he'd never really pushed like he was pushing before. But think about more likely that you may be losing, you know, a pound of fat a week and putting on a pound of muscle a month. And so while it looks like it's a slow shift,, it will be a dramatic change in how you feel and what you look like, especially naked. So I talked earlier about how to measure body composition, but I just wanna share how I like to do this using a DEXA scan. Now a DEXA scan is right now considered the gold standard for doing this. And what I love about a DEXA scan is that they're readily accessible now and they've come down a lot in price. So you probably will be able to do this for about $100. I know there's a, a gym and fitness center near my house where we do them them every 6 to 12 months, and they're— I think it's $75 or $100, and then they have all my records and we just compare. When you do a DEXA scan, it takes about 10 minutes. You want to make sure that you go to the same place with the same provider under the same circumstances. I recently heard a podcast where someone was talking about going and doing some carb loading, and before a DEXA scan, I'm like, well, that's just going to throw off the results. You want to keep the conditions always the same. And the machine the same as well. When you do a DEXA scan, what it's going to do is it's going to take basically a low, low, low dose of radiation. It's going to scan your body and it's going to give you your bone mineral density. It's going to give your, you, your skeletal muscle mass in each area. So your arms, your legs, you'll be able to see if you're, you're even. And it's going to give you your body fat. It's going to show you where that body fat is. You might think, you know, but it's going to show you for sure where it is. And then it's going to give you some norms so that you can compare compare what's called your appendicular lean mass index to people your age. You wanna be at the 25th percentile or higher for your age, right? You wanna be the best. It's also gonna give you, um, your T and Z scores so you can identify osteoporosis or osteopenia. And then it's gonna give you your visceral adipose tissue so you can make sure that your visceral adipose tissue is at 10% or less of your overall body fat. Now, obviously you're not doing that all the time and you wouldn't want to. When you go to do your DEXA scan that day, that same morning, get up and do your bioimpedance, and then you're going to corroborate the results. Because I have a very expensive bioimpedance machine at home that's segmental, and it's still a couple percentage off from what the DEXA scan says for me. In fact, it's 5% off. So I know that to be true, and so I just use the one at home to monitor changes., but I know my absolute number is gonna come from the DEXA. There's actually a new technology out here for the bone mineral density and quality of bone scores. And so there's, while I love the DEXA for the ease of use and where it's at, if you're really looking for your bone health, I want you to go a step further and find something called the Echolite REMS testing. I recently had this done and now I'm on a mission to get everybody to understand this for, for Bone health, because it goes beyond just bone mineral density and it looks at bone architecture and bone quality. And it gives you not just a T-score and Z-score for osteopenia and osteoporosis, but it gives you a 5-year fracture risk. And it shows you exactly where that fracture risk is. Is it in your back? Is it in your hips? Like, pretty amazing stuff. And there's no radiation at all with this. This hopefully will become a technology that's gonna get more and more out there. Um, but I will tell you, I I've been checking bone mineral density for years because I took a medication in my 20s that put me at risk for osteoporosis. And even though I do all the things, um, you know, I knew that that medication had kind of a big devastating effect. I was fine on my DEXA scans, always have been. I was not fine on the Echolite REM scan. And so it just shows you that there's more to this to look at. It's, it's why we don't just look at a weight. We look at what the weight's made up of, and we don't just look at bone mineral density, we need to look at architecture and quality too. So that's just a little aside, but that's what I want you to just be aware of. And hopefully this technology will get out there way more. But for you, what you're going to make sure you're doing is look for that DEXA, get it done once a year, correlate it with what's going on with your bioimpedance machine at home. And then also once a week, do your waist and hip measurements so you can really ensure that you are— I would say if you're losing weight but not losing your waist, you're making yourself yourself worse, not better. I'm on a mission to help you age powerfully, and I don't want you to miss out. So be sure to subscribe to the channel.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Would you prefer an ad-free experience? Join my VIP podcast at subscribe to JJ jjvirginia.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year to unlock uninterrupted ad-free access to all the episodes and insights you love. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you.

From you.

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.

Struggling with weight loss? Prolon's 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program designed to promote fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it assists the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism and target visceral fat. In just 5 days, ProLon offers a science-backed approach to weight loss without extreme restriction or guesswork. Get 15% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at ProLonLife.com/now.