Why Lifting Weights is the Secret to Fat Loss

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What if I told you that the most common fat loss advice given to women over 40 is the very thing keeping them tired, frustrated, and stuck in that same body year after year? Lose the weight first, then lift weights. Well, it sounds logical, right? It sounds responsible. It even sounds scientific. But biologically, it's completely backwards. If you're focusing on cardio and caloric restriction rather than resistance training training, you can lose as much as 40 or 50% of your weight from precious metabolism-boosting muscle. Said another way, if you don't protect your muscle, you don't just lose fat, you lose the very tissue that burns the fat. Of all the women I've ever coached, the research I've read, and the experts I've interviewed, I know the answer is not to burn more calories over building more muscle. And today I want to show you why lifting isn't the reward for losing fat. It's the reason fat loss finally works because more muscle is actually the fast fastest way to reignite your metabolism, which means burning more fat. Let's get into it. 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 I use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. 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. My virtual JJ will reply directly, and trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribetojj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.

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Where did this idea come from that women should lose weight first before lifting? You know, the first time I heard it was in grad school from a professor. Now, my grad school was very cardio-focused. In fact, the lab was full of Precor equipment, and we were encouraged with a very heavy hand to do all of our research on cardio because back then the weight loss industry was all about cardio. Use cardio to create a caloric deficit because it's all about calories in, calories out, right? And the best way The way to do that was to burn more calories with cardio. Now, this sounds logical, but why does it fall apart? Why doesn't it work? And I'll tell you what was great back then is I was actually out in the real world so I could see what we were being taught doesn't work because your body isn't just a bank account. It's a chemistry lab and it's a history book. Here's what happens when you do loads of cardio. Tell me if you can relate. Number 1, if you're doing more cardio, you're actually moving less throughout the rest of the day. Your body tends to gets you into homeostasis. So you do more cardio, but you move less. So you kind of end up almost back to where you were in the first place. You may notice, like I do, which doesn't happen with weights for me, but when I do cardio, I am hungry. I even say I'm hangry. So you tend to get hungrier. And the minute you stop, well, you don't have the muscle mass on. So that excess calorie burn that you have, it's over, it stops. And let's face it, you don't have much afterburn unless you're doing a lot of high-intensity interval training or resistance training. So you're not burning more calories at rest. So you stop, that stops. So biggest question here is what's happening metabolically when you diet, when you do caloric restriction without any resistance training. And what we know, especially since the GLP-1s have kind of unmasked this, is if you do a lot of caloric restriction, you can lose anywhere from 25 to 50% of that weight loss from muscle. We saw this during The Biggest Loser with that metabolic adaptation where they had fast weight loss and then their calorie needs after the fact were much lower. That's called metabolic adaptation, when your calories don't back up to where they should be based on what your weight, your height, your age, and all of those things are. It's lower. Think about how hard it would be to maintain your weight if you were like some of the people from The Biggest Loser. You now needed 500 calories less per day. So you had to under-eat every single day. Basically, you're hungry every single day. I don't know about you, but I'd last, I don't know, a minute, a day, maybe. Here's the other side of that. Besides that metabolic adaptation, what else is that muscle loss doing? And I like to say that muscle is 3 things. Muscle is your metabolic Spanx. Muscle is your sugar sponge, and muscle is your multitasking messenger. Let's break those down. Number 1, muscle is the only way— adding more muscle into your body to really impact your resting metabolic rate, how many calories you burn if you just hung out on the couch all day long. Now, it's not huge. Every pound of muscle might be 7 or 10 calories. But you know what? You add another 10 pounds of muscle, it's about 100 more calories a day that you're burning. But that's really not the big thing. Muscles, metabolic spanks, metabolic rate, but it holds everything in tighter. People talk about muscle tone and wanting to spot reduce and tone an area. The way you do that is to get more muscle in that area because muscle will create tone by being partially contracted and it will hold everything in tighter. Now muscle's also your sugar sponge. What do I mean by that? In the exercise science world, we call it a glucose sink because it is the biggest user of sugar. So when you're eating carbohydrates, you're either going to store them in your muscles and your liver as glycogen, as fuel for later, or you're going to turn them into fat and store them likely around your waist, right, or other areas. But if you're metabolically unhealthy, your visceral adipose tissue is one of the places that takes those up. If you've got more muscle, you've got more places to put those carbs rather than turning them into fat. Now, I think the most exciting piece of all of this is that muscle is a multitasking messenger. Muscle, every time it contracts— doesn't mean you like doing a pinky push-up, Right, but contracting under force, your muscles release these myokines, these messengers. These things are not just in your muscle or next to it. They're all over your body, and they can do things like tell your body to have better mood, to improve your cognition, to reduce inflammation, to boost your immune system. In fact, here's a cool one. If you're gonna go do something hard, cognitively hard, a task, best thing you could do is do a little resistance training or high-intensity interval training beforehand, cuz you'll have better processing speed, better cognition for the next 4 hours. How cool is that? I often say I don't like hacks, but that's a hack I can get behind. So you can see beyond just preserving your resting metabolic rate, muscle does so many cool things. But if you don't preserve it, fat loss becomes so much harder because we burn fat first place in our muscles and our muscles help us become more insulin sensitive. So remember, if your insulin's high, the doors to your fat cells are locked. And if you're losing muscle, you've got lower resting metabolic rate. All of that is a recipe for disaster for trying to maintain your weight. Speaking of recipes for disaster, let's talk about my college years when I'm all of a sudden I'm not home. I was on a super tight budget. Guess what's cheap? Carbs. I was really stressed. I wasn't sleeping well. I might be staying out too late. Maybe. I mean, it was fun, stressful, cheap carbs. All that together. Guess what? So then I started thinking, okay, I started to gain weight. You heard of the freshman 15? And so I thought, I'll just do more cardio. I literally remember once after a binge sitting on an exercise bike for 8 hours. Problem is, that's not sustainable, but also it doesn't work. What happens when you ride a bike for 8 hours? You're hungry. Now, what was cool around this time is I also started working with personal training clients and taking them to Gold's Gym in Venice, the mecca of bodybuilding. And I saw there people weren't really doing cardio, they were doing resistance training, and they looked amazing. Women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, so old, I would have killed to have their bodies. And I realized then Trying to control your weight with cardio is like living paycheck to paycheck. I know what I was doing then. Versus controlling your weight with resistance training is like having this great investment account and living off the interest. I'll pick that. Now, when I was in grad school, fortunately, though I was taught that you should not lift weights till you lose the weight, I was out in the real world. So I was working with clients to pay my way through grad school, and I saw what happened when they didn't lift weights. If they didn't lift weights, they just did cardio, they became a smaller person, basically the same shape, smaller person with very easy way to gain weight. They got hungrier. They became skinny fats. Now, I knew that I was not going to get paid to make people worse, so I didn't listen to my professors. I started in on resistance training. Back then, we didn't have bioimpedance scales. I'd have my tape measure, my skinfold calipers to figure out their body composition. And what a difference. People didn't have to super restrict their calories. Their whole body shape changed. They created lasting results and they created lasting confidence. Like, it's a whole different ballgame. I'm gonna share a couple stories and you'll really get what I mean here. And one of 'em's kind of actually hurts my heart a bit and you'll understand why. So this one's a little cliché. I literally had this one woman who I was training at the gym and this was when I was at Matrixx in Beverly Hills, way back when. This chain's not even around anymore. And I was training this gal and she was married to a doctor. The doctor was not working out, just she was. And she, oh my gosh, her transformation was insane. She got so strong, so ripped, so lean. She looked fantastic. Fabulous. I thought, gosh, her husband must be so stoked. Uh, no. Her husband insisted that she quit. What? He was threatened. I mean, I was so bummed by that. I've seen that play out a couple times, both by the husband or the wife. I've seen it go both ways. So now I involve the couples together. So note to you, if you are working out, like, bring your spouse on board. It's so much better and so much more fun when you do this together. I always joke I have helped my husband become the hottest guy ever at, um, in my opinion, at 62. Like, he literally is more ripped, more lean, healthier, fitter at 62 than he's been his entire life. I said, I'm a very confident and lucky woman. Then I had another gal who came to me, and I remember she was telling me, if I eat more than 1,000 calories a day, I gain weight. I'm thinking, oh, this is the most crazy thing I've ever heard. This was Vicki W. And I'm like, not a chance. She was a dieting queen, man. She'd been dieting her whole life, and this was her hobby, which just— yeah. So my legacy is to get this to never be a thing anymore, to never have a Vicki ever have to face this. But she had all the diet stuff in the pantry, like the Butter Buds and the fat-free and that, like all that stuff. But I thought, oh, no way is she not able to maintain her weight on 1,000 calories a day until I was around her. And I was like, wow, she had really damaged her metabolism because she'd never done resistance training ever. And she would lose weight and then she'd, you know, lose weight with no cardio, just really restricting calories down to 800, 600, a day. Then she would binge it back on again. So she'd lose muscle and fat, put on fat. When she came to me, she was massively high body fat, like, you know, 40-plus percent body fat. But she also had major metabolic adaptation. And once you get to that point, the biggest thing you have to do is really focus on healing that metabolism. I say this because if you're in that situation, you can get out of that situation. You can dig yourself out of that metabolic hole, and you dig yourself out of that metabolic hole with muscle. Muscle is your lifeline. Another gal, Karen, this one was really interesting to me because Karen and I were basically the same height and Karen and I were basically the same weight, but Karen was 20% body fat higher than me and wore multiple clothing sizes bigger than me. And it was such a great indicator of what happens when you don't build muscle. That again, remember, muscle's that metabolic spanx that holds everything in tighter. And so she's just like the other Vicki had been doing everything through cardio. And had never focused on body composition or fat mass. And really, back then, it was not easy to have your body fat tested. You either had to go to a university and get in a dunk tank— I kid you not— or you had to have skinfolds, which are not that reliable, especially if you're not metabolically healthy. So it's so much easier and so much easier now. You know, I've been focused on body composition rather than weight and really taking that muscle-first approach ever since. Way back when. And what still blows me away is I keep hearing this, "I'll lift when I lose the weight." I hear that. Or, "I don't want to get bulky." Or, "It's too late for me." I just did a talk somewhere and I said, if you're thinking any of these things, or, "I'm afraid I'll get injured," just kind of raise your pinky. Let me see. You don't have to out yourself in front of the whole crowd, but you know, a lot of pinkies wagging. So if that's you, let's just kind of blow through those myths. Because these are the things that are going to keep you stuck in the cardio restriction cycles where you're losing muscle, gaining back fat, cycle, cycle, cycle. And then you'll feel smaller maybe, but softer, and you'll have the same shape. I always say if you're losing weight without losing your weight, you're making yourself— losing weight without losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. So don't wait to get lighter. Lift first. It's going to make it easier for you. And you actually don't want to be lighter. You want to be a smaller, a tighter, a more compact version of yourself. You want to Solid like a rock. I think there's a song like that. Now, I don't want to get bulky. I will tell you, 40 years of helping people lift weights, of working with women and men, specifically women, over 40 years, I've never had a woman lift weights and get bulky. Now, there's always the outlier, but I haven't seen it. And I see just the opposite. And someone saying they need to lose fat first, putting on muscle is going to help you burn fat better. It's super important. It is the answer. Remember, muscle changes everything. And why does weight regain happen so quickly when muscle is lost? I'll tell you, there's a really interesting theory out there. I'd love someone to do a study on this, that our body does that to help us build back muscle. The problem is, if you're not doing resistance training, you'll build back fat. And that whole fear of lifting or getting bulky or getting a fear of getting injured. Remember, you're going to get injured in life. Likely. Not injured at the gym. The gym protects you from life. You train to get better at life. And as you are lifting, as you're doing things to challenge your muscle, it's going to give you this confidence and this strength that you never knew you had before. It's so cool. It takes you out of that cycle. And we've all been— I remember feeling this in college, that desperation. Like, if this doesn't change right away, like that, just anxiety, desperation, fear of failure. That's just awful. So let's flip the whole order of this and make this whole thing approachable. Because when When you lift, when you take a muscle-first approach, instead of waiting till you lose the weight to do it, you add muscle, burn fat, and create a sustainable body composition. It protects your metabolism. And, you know, if you think, well, and here's what I'll tell you about that. You know how men seem to lose weight easier? It's because they have more muscle. When we optimize for muscle, men and women have the same metabolism. And so when you optimize for muscle, It's going to improve your insulin sensitivity. It's going to help with your appetite regulation. You have some GLP-1 release when you're doing resistance training. And here's the best news. Ready? It doesn't take much. You can do 2 days a week of 2 exercises per body part and 2 sets per exercise. That's like 20 to 30 minutes twice a week. We'll link to my How to Get Started on a Resistance Training Program cheat sheet to show you how easy it is. But it's like 20 to 30 minutes twice a week. You can do this. And if you're afraid of getting injured, there's a new type of training, E20 training. I will link to this in the show notes. Full body electrical muscle stim that you can do 2 days a week of 20 minutes. You won't get injured. If you've got joint issues, it's a great way to solve for it. But again, I like to say you don't train to get better at training. You train to get better at life. We are going to work on strengthening up your muscles, your connective tissue, your joints, your bones. If you step off the curb wrong, you don't fall and break a hip, right? That's like not on my watch. I want you to really focus on progress by looking at how much stronger you're getting. What's your muscle quality like? A great way to do that is through a grip strength test. And then what's going on with your fat-free mass? And a great way to do that is with the body composition bioimpedance scale test. With the goal really is that you are going to focus on muscle first and stop thinking about, I don't want to do that because I'll get bulky. That is the number one thing that I want you to let go of. Okay, pinky promise. Because if you treat Strength training, resistance training, challenging your muscles is step one. It will change everything for you, I promise. So even if this week, if all we did this week was say, okay, on Monday let's do push-ups, on Tuesday let's do air squats, on Wednesday let's take some water bottles or a band and do a bent-over row, and then Thursday repeat it for Friday, Saturday, it would change. Just do that for a couple weeks. And what you're going to start to see when you do that is that you're stronger, you feel more confident, You feel more comfortable in your body. And here's the thing. If you take nothing else from, from this video, take this. You do not earn the right to lift weights by losing fat. You actually earn fat loss by lifting weights. Strength isn't the after, it's the first move. Because every rep you do is telling your body a story. Keep this muscle tissue and burn that fat instead. So this week, don't wait for the motivation. Don't wait for the scale. Don't wait to feel ready. Pick one simple strength habit. 2 days of those bodyweight squats, 2 days of those push-ups against the kitchen counter, maybe 5 minutes with the resistance bands. Do that bent-over row. And it's— this isn't to punish your body. It's to teach your body how to get strong, how to change. And then you'll feel the difference getting out of the chair, carrying groceries, walking upstairs, how powerful you feel, how confident you feel. Because confidence doesn't come from getting smaller. It comes from getting stronger. And when you build strength first, your metabolism, your hormones, and your body composition will follow. Muscle changes everything. Now, if this shifted how you think about fat loss, make sure you subscribe to this channel because I share science-backed strategies every week to help you build muscle, boost your metabolism, and age powerfully. And if you know a woman who's still stuck in the cardio and restriction loop, save her, send this video to her because strength is contagious. I'll see you in the next one. Be sure to join me Join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. 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 813-565-2122. 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. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the 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.