Get Leaner Faster With These Simple But Proven Nutrition Hacks

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Hi, everyone. So welcome to everything. Hormones, adrenals, weight loss, and trauma. And I am so excited to have jj, one of my friends that I've known for a long time, actually, like longtime friend, buddy, we started this together back in the day, and I want to really get down and dirty. Here's some of the questions that people have. I mean, so many of my audience is starting to ask, you know what? I know how to chart everything. I know I need to have more exercise. I know I need to sleep more, and things are still not moving. And they're sick and tired of hearing the same thing because they know all that. Some of it isn't working for them. So how do we really help people understand there's other things that we need to do in addition to that to really help move the needle and also get healthier. It's not just about weight loss.

Yeah. So I'm going to throw this big concept out there, and it kind of comes from this, like, the current crazy statistics of 6.8% of the population now metabolically healthy. It's like every time you click on the link to go, what is it? It's worse. I'm like, how did it get worse in a month? And then, you know, the obesity statistics now at 43%. And. And I don't know, Marcel. I saw that, that 60 Minutes article interview, and it made me insane talking that 50 to 85% of obesity's genetics when at the turn of the 19th century, it was 0.5%. I'm like, no, our genes didn't in one have this major shift. So I'm going to throw out an idea.

And I think it's kind of obvious we're clearly doing this all wrong. And what if we are looking in the wrong direction? We keep talking about trying to lose weight, and I would argue that that's actually the wrong thing to try to do.

What we do instead is we need to focus totally on having really good quality muscle. Here's why.

When you focus first on muscle, and I'm really talking especially for women here, right. Because starting at 40, we lose 1% of our muscle mass a year, by the way, 2 to 4% strength, 6 to 10% power. And at the age of 60, that starts to double. That's if you're not doing anything. And if you're eating the typical diet where the woman's getting like 40 to 60 grams pathetic of protein a day, or following the RDA, which is really dumb. Really dumb. So if you look at that and you go all right, our metabolism.

What? What's going to dictate our metabolism? Well, one of the biggest things we can do to make a dent in our metabolism is how much muscle we have on. You know, also things like non exercise activity, thermogenesis, you know, not having your temperature the same in the house all the time, improving, creating more caloric deficit by doing things like eating more protein. Those things all work, but the very first step is stop trying to lose weight. Because if you're trying to lose weight, the best way to lose weight is to sit on the couch and barely eat so that you lose as much muscle as possible because it's heavy, and then you'll really damage your metabolism. And that's what I think's really gone on is this. We haven't focused on the right thing. We're getting on a scale. We're not looking at what our weight's made up of. And if we just change the focus to how do we put on muscle? That muscle's metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter so we look better naked and it supports a better metabolism. Muscle is like a sponge. It's going to take the carbohydrates that you do eat and pull them into your muscles for stored energy for later, rather than putting it on your belly and your butt. Right. And muscle then by doing that, really helps us with blood sugar and insulin metabolism. So I come down to why don't we focus first there? Why don't we start to make mandatory that once or twice a year we're getting a DEXA scan so that we can see how much muscle we have, where it is. Is it even what's going on with our body fat? Do we have visceral adipose tissue? And then when we're at home measuring and weighing, we're really looking at a biopedance scale. So we can see if we're adding muscle, which is a slow go, and if we're losing our waist along with it. And that is my whole focus now is what do we need to do if that's our focus, holding onto and putting on muscles we age so that we can playful out to 100 so we can be like you dancing your tushy off, right?

What do we need to do? And once you get to that, it's a very different focus and it feels so much more like something that you can actually control and make a dent in.

So within that, though, you know, what we see, I think, in our female population, jj, is that so many people go crazy with it. So then they are working out for three hours, four hours at a time, and then they're not seeing any results and they get all pissed off. And, you know, we are sick and tired of counting points, counting calories. And here's the thing that I thought so interesting. There was a News article on YouTube on the new diabetic medication semi glutide, which is a protagonist 400 million views.

For 100 million views. And it's a medication that we use for diabetes. It's not meant it is now being used for weight loss. The problem is that most people that use it gain the weight on the other side because they're eating so little and it also causes havoc with their blood sugars.

Right. And it's going to do the very thing that we're talking about. What's it going to do now? You're going to lose muscle again. And so what I would say is when you really look at what it takes to put muscle on, it's not three to four hours in the gym. It's not. And that's the cool thing. It's lifting heavy weights. It's lifting. It's doing more than what you're used to because that's what you have to do for your muscle to grow. And it's feeding your muscles well. So focusing protein first, which just in and of itself, if we started to look at your diet and went, you know what, let's put protein first at the focal point. Let's make sure that you get at least 0.8 to 1 gram per pound of your target body weight divided between your meals with at least 30 grams at a meal. All of a sudden, just doing that, you'll be less hungry. It has a bigger thermic effect. Digestion's one of the key parts of your metabolism, 10 to 15%. But you have to have the amino acids to feed your muscles. In fact.

Research showing that if you didn't even exercise, but you bumped up your protein intake, you will improve your muscle mass. Now, that isn't saying don't work out, but then you have the additive effect of lift heavy weights and eat protein. And by the way, I think every woman over 50, 50 plus should be taking creatine. I think it just should absolutely be a must. Like, I'm on a mission to get everybody on creatine. And for any woman listening going, I don't want big muscles. The cool thing about weight training is if you start to see that you have more muscle than you want, which if you do, I will fall off my chair. And be shocked because you know, we are, we're, you know, we, we just don't have that. We're not hairy men. We don't have the ability to build muscle like men do. And especially when we're 50 plus. But you can always back it off anyway if that fabulous magical incident could happen for you. But when you put protein, creatine and the right type of exercise together along with great sleep magic.

Yep. How much creatine?

So the recommendation is and it really depends if you're plant based or not. If you're eating along your guidelines, then it's going to be somewhere into 3 to 5 grams. If someone's got is a plant based diet it might be 5 grams plus. But generally for women, 3 to 5 grams. And what you need to do is to reach tissue saturation. So it'll start to work. So that could take a month if you were doing that. Or you could just do a little loading for a week. Five days of five grams four times a day. And then you'll have your tissue four times a day. Wow.

Okay.

Yeah. That's just a tissue saturation five day plan. Once you've done that, it's three to five grams once a day. It's very simple.

So like that to me is such an obvious. They're using it for.

Sarcopenia as people age so that you. So it just makes a ton of sense to do that. So that is that now that plus collagen are two of the ones that I'm like everybody, everybody should be on these things. But you know, what you measure and monitor, you can improve. And what I like about all this the most is. And I'll give you a little personal story, as I started to do this, I really was pushing like I just, I'm really in test be the guinea pig. And my weight went up and I had to do this whole mental game and I went and got a dexa and my body fat is extremely low. I've always had low body fat, but it was even, you know, it was actually the same body fat I had tested when I was 39, which is 14%, which for a woman's ridiculous. But I've always, I mean naturally very. That that is more my type. Like for a woman, if you were 22% we would be that's fantastic. But it gives you, you, you've got to realize as you're putting muscle on, your weight may go up a little bit. And if your weight goes up because you put on muscle, that's fantastic because you'll actually work smaller sizes and you'll have a better metabolism, you'll burn more calories.

And what about protein? Jj One of the things that I've seen in my practice clinically over the years is I had the hardest time getting vegetarians to be stabilized because they're carbohydrate intake was so high and the amount of protein they just couldn't get them to, you know, stabilize their health.

There's no way for a vegan or vegetarian. I know this is not popular, but you know what, having the misinformation is killing us. If we, you know, if we are 6.8% of the population now metabolically healthy, if we've got 70% plus of the population overweight or obese, we have to be, we have to tell this is, science is not a religion. And the deal is if you want to get 0.8 grams per pound of target body weight into your body and the same amount of chicken, like let's say you eat 6 ounces of chicken, you would have to eat 4 cups of quinoa to get that protein. There is no way as a vegan or vegetarian to get optimal protein without overloading your fat and carbs. And if I can think of the worst combination to put together, it's fat, the fat carb combination. That's the perfect combination of raise your blood sugar, raise your insulin, store that fat easily in your body. Like, who wants to do that? So the only way to work with someone, and that's why I look at it with vegans or vegetarians, we're not saying don't eat plants. I think clean animal protein plus plants is the perfect combination because you've got, right, the proteins for, for building blocks for your body and the plants for building blocks for your microbiome. So it's like the perfect combo. But for someone who's, who's a vegan or vegetarian. I always dig into why are we doing this? Is it a health reason or, or is it something that is a religious thing? If it's religious, hey, then we need to work on what we need to do here. But if it's, you've been told somewhere along the line that this is the healthier thing. Show me the research that that grass fed red meat steak is hurting you. Because the research I'm seeing actually is helping you minimize depression, have better mental health outcomes. Like, you know, show me that research. Because it is a bunch of chatter out there that's not true. Absolutely damaging everybody's metabolisms.

Oh my God. And more than That, I mean, if we look at some of the inflammatory cascades that go on with that amount of carbs that they have in their diet, and they're trying, you know, desperately to do that, and then they're hungry all the time and they're eating right. It just doesn't work.

I know when I was a vegan, like, I've, you know, how long have we been doing this? Like, I've been doing this 40 plus years. So I've been my own guinea pig. And I was a vegan, I was a vegetarian. I, I was going to be hospitalized when I was a vegan. They're like, we're either hospitalizing you or go get chicken. I'm like, I'll get a chicken. I'll do that.

Oh, no. I mean, I was macrobiotic early in my, my life and I was, I remember one time I was at the counter and somebody had a steak and I just, I couldn't stand it. So I went back and got an organic steak and was like, that was it for me.

It was like, ooh, I know. You know, but just think of even the fatty acid imbalances you're going to get when you're trying to get your omega 3s from plants, but you're not going to get the EPN, DHA you need because you can't, you know, break it down to that. Then you're getting a lot of Omega 6s. So you will be inflammatory. You'll have like too many carbs. There's just, it's impossible to do unless you use protein powders. And then even with the protein powders, I don't know how you're getting things like carnitine. I don't know how you're getting the DHA and epa. What are you going to do now? Find algae, find protein powder, spike it with carnitine. At some point, aren't you scratching your head going, why do I have to use all of these other things? You know, if I built a diet that if I have to supplement in order to get to the baseline nutritional needs I have, there's a problem.

Oh, hands down. And you see it clinically in terms of things like cholesterol and blood sugars and things like that, you know, on the weight loss plan that I have, that, you know, about my patients, their, their hemoglobin A1C's come down two points sometimes in 12 weeks. If they're diabetics, that's crazy, screaming down and blood pressure, I mean, but it's what we're talking about it's protein and vegetables. So it really works well in that regard.

Yeah, I mean, research is clear, too. Like, if you start with protein and vegetables, like, eat that first, you'll get some healthy fats from the clean protein. You'll probably use them on the vegetables, and then at that point, you'll see if you need what. What else you might need. But for most people, that's like, just start there. You'll actually get full.

Let's talk about something else, jj, and that is that, you know, a lot of women have unbelievable sugar cravings and also unbelievable cravings for carbohydrates. So let's kind of look at that and unwrap that, because, as you know, the food industry is very much oriented towards how can I get people to eat more than one of anything? So they've got additives in it that really contribute to that. But let's talk about sugar first, because sugar has no redeeming factors. If it ever had to be FDA approved, it wouldn't because it has nothing in it that's helpful except for it tastes good.

Right? I remember when I wrote the Sugar Impact Diet, Marcel. My mom, we were going to Hawaii together, and she said, well, I was getting groceries ordered in. She goes, well, I'm going to eat light while I'm there, so just get me orange juice, toast, white bread, jam, cereal, skim milk. I'm like, whoa. You know, to read my book. But she told me. She's like, what? Huh? She said, yeah, but we need sugar, right? I was like, holy smokes. Like, this is what the belief is out there. Wow. I think the reason we're craving is because we're not getting enough protein.

Yeah.

I think the reason we're craving is because we're eating these. I. You know, I think we really need to distinguish. I call them dirty processed foods, because all food that we're eating, basically, unless you live on a farm, is processed. We want to make sure that we're not eating these foods that have been processed to turn us into craving monsters, which is what these things have. And, you know, it doesn't matter if it says keto on it or whatever. Like, we found this little keto cereal that I literally have to measure out and let myself have because left my own devices, I would eat the entire thing, and it would be ridiculous. Too much healthy foods, unhealthy. These things are all designed to make you want to have more and more.

And more, hands down.

Right. I mean, they don't. And they mess your taste buds up because now something that should be sweet and should taste delicious. A blueberry, a BlackBerry, you know, an orange, all of a sudden tastes bland because you're so used to all this, you know, ultra processed stuff that is built to make you just crave it. And you get duped by looking at these things because it, you know, oh, my gosh. They made a candy bar healthy. It's like, no, it's a candy bar.

This is 25 grams, 33 grams of sugar or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Right.

What do you suggest for people that are just craving it? You know, how do you, how do you get people to really. Because it is something that's a huge issue for women, especially when they have their styling periods and it's premenstrual or they're kind of shifting that dynamic and going to perimenopause.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. For those of you who are, you know, having periods, perimenopause, the light is so much better at the end of the tunnel is all I have to say. Like, it's so good. I.

Who knew? My gosh, it's the way to go.

What you see is what you get. You're not going up and down anymore. It's like, steady as they got.

So good.

So, yeah, I really believe that we, it really comes from food, but that we have to because it's, it's an addiction. I mean, I love what Mark Hyman called it. Sugar is our number one recreational drug of choice. And so in order to break that, you have to really focus on it. Now, I don't believe that you go cold turkey. I think that's. It's just like, hey, I think I'm going to go keto after eating this high carb diet. No, you don't do that. Your body has to learn how to shift and become a hybrid. So I think the first thing that we do is ADD before we take away, get in the protein, get in the vegetables, and start to become aware of the different levels of sugar in food, you know, and start to downshift. I call my, you know, my red sugar impact foods. Things like potato chips, the stuff we know we shouldn't be eating. What could we substitute in for that? Could we take a potato chip and maybe switch it to a sieta chip? Is it something you should be really eating a lot of? No, but it's way better than the potato chip to start. So we just start doing some downshifts and we do that for a week or two so that we get used to having more protein. We get Used to having more non starchy vegetables so our fibers up, better blood sugar control. And then we downshift all the way into getting all the sugar out. Even I take all fructose out for a couple weeks because I want people to just lose that ability that we build over time to get really good at transporting fructose to the liver and making fat. I don't want to be good, good at making fat. I want to really, that's not a skill I want to have, you know, so I want to be good at burning it. Right. And so yes, you can totally accomplish it and give yourself a couple weeks to do it. It's like you can't go from eating, eating sugar. And I think people don't realize how much sugar sneaking into their diet. So it always starts first with that awareness, that monitoring to see which you can do with any of these tracking, you know, tracking apps are so great. I believe we all should take a week and just track just for awareness to know how much protein we're really getting in at each meal, how much sugar is really happening just for the awareness, not as a long term thing because like that's no way to live and you don't need to once you're done. Just like I think it's great to wear a cgm, a continuous glucose monitor for a month to really start to go, oh, shoot, when I eat at 9 o' clock at night, man, that messes up my morning blood sugar.

Yeah. My sleep keep us trashed, you know.

So just so you can really connect the dots between your habits, between what you're eating and how you feel and you're super empowered once you do that, then you're not like, I'm gonna have a cheat day because you know, like what it does, you know.

Yeah, for sure. So there's a couple of other things too that I notice also. And when people don't have enough sweetness emotionally in their lives, they also go for sugar. And when their neurotransmitters are imbalanced, that's the other time that I see people really craving sugar as well because it's, it's one of those quick fixes that helps increase serotonin temporarily. So I think you're right. You know, that combination of, you know, you can't stop cold turkey, it just doesn't work. But to be aware of how much you're getting in and what you can do about it really makes a big difference. And I think so many people need to learn about themselves and they don't know.

Yeah.

They don't have to sit back for a moment and go, huh?

I know. Treat yourself, become a scientist and take the shame out. Take the shame, take the desperation, all of the self loathing. Lose that. Easier said than done. But if you approach this scientifically and go, all right, I'm just going to like now start to really see what works for me, what doesn't. It's a very different, different thing. And I, I, as you were talking about the sweetness thing, I was thinking back to a study that where they were giving women it was overweight and obese women, they were giving them five HTP to help with their depression, 100 milligrams three times a day, if my memory serves. And they were like, why are they losing weight?

And because they weren't craving sugar anymore because all of a sudden their serotonin levels were where they needed to be. So, you know, I always, I, I love what you do because you look at all of the different biological aspects so that stuff can get handled. You know, there's so much with your program that immediately gets handled that someone that doesn't necessarily need to know all the science behind because you've already figured out for them, but the results are clear from just what, like what you've managed to accomplish with this program is, is like, you know, this should get a Nobel Prize, right? In my humble opinion. But it's because you're addressing those things that, that people have so much shame about because they feel like they're a bad person when they're, you know, just being, their biology's off. Like they're, you know, their biochemistry is off and it's not their fault, but they need to know it so they can get it fixed.

I did a, a quiz with some of the participants and I said, you know, I just want you over the next week, an hour a day, pay attention to how often you denigrate yourself. Say, you know, I don't have that much stress. There's not much stress going on in my life. I said, okay, just for an hour, write down how many times. Most of the women said 60 times in that one hour. They did once a week. So if you kind of multiply that as how often we're, you know, denigrating ourselves or it's this or it's that or we're really so hard on our, that also changes our neurotransmitters, that also changes our cortisol level, that contributes to all of what you're talking about and that inflammatory cascade as well. So we've Got that on top of it as well. So we need to eat protein, we need to change our diet, but we need to change our thinking, too.

Yes, well, clearly we need to change our thinking. And honestly, I look back at, like, now that I'm almost coming up on two years of meditating with Dr. Joe, like, I've. I'm. I'm now, what, 22 months into this whole thing, you really can break the habit of being yourself, and you really can change a lot of those things, which is amazing. And I think it first starts. I had this great. This was really funny, Marcel. I had a bariatric doctor who told me, and I was his. I was his nutritionist. Okay? So I'm the nutritionist for this bariatric doctor helping him because he is obese. You cannot make this up. Okay, so he's obese, but he has a bariatric practice. And he tells me. He goes, you know, I have a thing that I use, and if the patient will do it, it works 100 of the time. And I'm like, well, why wouldn't we make this mandatory? And I was like, well, what is this thing that you do? And he goes, he said, I have them take a picture of the body they really would love to have. That is their ideal. Right. And I think that's an important thing, not society's ideal. Like, what would be best for them? Put their face on it and carry it around, because you have to believe it. Right? So it's just everything's created twice, first in your mind's eye, and you start living as if. Because you're seeing yourself there already. Right. And seeing is believing. And so the obvious question was, well, dude, why aren't you doing that for yourself? But, you know, it's such a thing because we have to be able to really believe that we can be there. And, you know, one of the things.

I've done JJ for forever is I haven't oftentimes had take a picture, you know, on their phone or whatever, what they used to look like. And then I have them take a picture with their own head of that person and put in their journal and look at it every single day. Because that is exactly right. You know, as we think, so goes our life. Yeah.

And of course, that picture that they used to look like was the picture that they didn't like either.

Right, right, right.

I mean, that's the. That's the funniest part.

Are you kidding? Absolutely. Yeah. So it's really looking at it now from the perspective of, oh, okay, that's what I want to embrace now in myself. And it's so, so true. We know that from science now as well.

But what if any wasted strength? What if we embraced energy? What if we, like, what if we started focusing on metrics that we can very clearly impact? And we know that if we impact those, it will fix the rest. If we fix our blood sugar, if we fix our sleep, if we build that muscle mass, so much stuff fixes.

Oh, absolutely. And my big thing is always our heads, what we're thinking, and our stories. If we don't deal with our story at some point, our story deals with us. And one of the chapters in my book was our issues are in our. Our tissues. And that's a huge part of what we're talking about today as well, is understanding all those dynamics about who you are, and all of those pieces make up you, and you're a unique you. And then we just have to help people figure out, how do we unravel that together with the sugar, with the protein, with the creatine, with all of that stuff? Because we can all, as we age, get even healthier. We know that more than ever before. And the notion for menopausal women is kind of like, oh, my God, you're over the hill. Good luck. It's like, oh, my God, that is so passe. It's just not true anymore for women.

No. It's like, you're in the best phase of your life, you know, Game on is. Is my statement on all this stuff. I was like, God, if someone had told me what this would be like, I would have just fast forwarded over to here, you know?

Okay, that's a great note to leave on. So anything else that you want to tell the audience, jj, These, you know, breaking pieces, information, breaking news that you have that you want to let people know about because people are getting tired of the old.

Yes. Well, I will tell you, I don't know if you know this, but I am about to turn 60.

Yay. I know it's. And so I've been training for it, and I am happy to say that I am actually healthier, fitter, more energetic. Like, everything is better here than it was turning 50, certainly turning 40, certainly turning 30, like, all of it. So I've just decided that I'm going to be a poster child woman for what is possible, because I feel like so much out there is portraying women again, you know, oh, they're. They're over the hill. Not like, oh, they're. They're rocking it. And And I'll leave you with this. I went to the Grammys a couple years ago and we didn't know when we were going that it was like the women's year. And and so it was a bunch of friends, you would know. And we were watching this whole thing with Dolly Parton and J. Lo and.

Diana Ross, who was doing her 70th birthday party and everyone was singing to her and she was in a ball game. I mean, it was absolutely fabulous. Dolly Parton was killing it. And we just looked at this and went, we have so much time, right? Like, what if those years, 50 plus were really the years that were going to be your best years, your most productive years, your most fun years, your most purpose driven years.

And I think it's really for up for us just to decide and choose that they are.

But it's also up to us that are in the field, jj, to be mentors for that. You know, one of the big things that I have in my life is I got to walk my talk. If I don't look the part, if I don't behave the part, if I don't inside enough to look at me, I have no business talking to other people.

And you've always done that. You always have.

So, jj, if they want to learn more about you, where do they go and how can they learn more about your programs and amazing things that you do and have done for years?

So JJvirgin.com I created something fun too because I feel like, like, you know, you hear all these things, you're like, ah. So I created a roadmap that's like start here and it just takes you through the process. And that's at jjvirgin.com forward/roadmap. So an easy thing if you're looking at like, what's step one.

Okay, awesome. And you have books. What about the books? How many books?

I have books. And by the new books coming out next year.

Swap it to drop it. But right now, virgin diet, sugar impact diet are the two most important, important ones. I really feel like, you know, everyone's got to figure out their hidden food intolerances. What's great on your program is that you pull all those things out so we don't have to worry about them. Right? Because if you are inflamed, it actually interferes with your body's ability to build muscle. It shuts down muscle protein synthesis. So inflammation has so many things that it wreaks havoc on. But that's one of the ways it wreaks habit on your havoc on your metabolism. And as we know, like, the biggest source of inflammation is going to come from. What's the end of your fork.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you, my dearest friend. And we. I'll let you know when we're going to put this up, and we'll let the world know because I think it's important information.

Thank you. Thank you. Honey, when. When were you on my podcast last? We should bring you back on, too.

I think that I have a time, or I think I'm in the calendar. I'm not. Yeah. If I'm not, I'll reach out and we'll do it then.

Yes, please. Pretty please.

Okay, we'll do.

All right. Thank you.

Bye.