The Secret to Aging Powerfully – Build Strength & Longevity with JJ Virgin

I am beyond excited to welcome this week's guest, JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and longtime mentor who has been a huge source of inspiration in my own journey. She's the powerhouse behind the Virgin diet, the Sugar Impact diet, and the host of the well Beyond 40 podcast where she dives deep into longevity, metabolic health and peak performance. JJ has transformed how millions approach nutrition and wellness, and today we'll tap into her expertise on aging powerfully to uncover real, actionable strategies for better health. Let's dig in.

Foreign.

I am so eternally grateful to be having this conversation with you. You are a absolute wealth of knowledge and a powerhouse of information for my people. So thank you so much for taking the time today and just sharing your expertise with all of us. I know you personally and professionally and I know that you are all about aging powerfully and just being powerful. And I would love for you to tell me, what does aging powerfully mean to you?

It's interesting. A decade ago, McCall, I never would have used this word because I was like, women. That's kind of a word women don't tend to embrace. If you've been paying attention to social media, you've probably seen the statistics of what happens as we age in terms of muscle loss and strength loss and power loss. But it's starting at around the age 30, we can lose up to 1% of our muscle a year. It's really like 3 to 8% per decade. It actually is way worse in terms of our strength. Like muscle mass is how much muscle we have. Muscle strength is how much you can move something one time. The best way to look at that is by can you open the jar? And then muscle powers, how fast can you do something? And while these sound like maybe they're more vanity, the reality is they're actually everything in terms of your longevity and your quality of life. We now know that your grip strength, if you're in the lowest end of the grip strength percentages, you have the highest all cause mortality. And if your gait speed slows down, you have high all cause mortality. Same with if your VO2 max decreases. And this is starting around age 30. When women go through menopause, it falls totally off the cliff because when estrogen drops, estrogen is our anabolic hormone. Contrary to what people think. It's actually like our testosterone and helps us build muscle. When I really was digging into this, I went, what is really happening? And when we're losing strength and power, a lot of that's because we're losing our fast twitch muscle fibers. That was my turnaround. Because when you start to think of aging, what you'll start to hear out there is, okay, well, you should move into a one story house. I'm like, no, you should move into a three story house. You should have your bathroom on the bottom floor and your kitchen on the top floor. And have to run up and down all day long like my mom used to do. And they say you should do less, go for walks instead of don't jump and do more easy yoga and Pilates. I'm like, no, you need to lift heavy things, you need to throw things, you need to jump, you need to do all these things because you're a snowball rolling down a hill. Otherwise picking up speed, aging more quickly. And you can turn this all around. And the reality is it's muscle that changes everything. And so I feel like I started out in my world as an exercise physiologist. I'm like, finally, finally I'm getting my deal.

You've been waiting for this.

I have been waiting 40 years. I've been like, taking people on field trips down to Gold's Gym in Venice and literally talking about weight training for 40 years while everyone was on the cardio bandwagon. And now, finally, it's like, turned around because the boomers are getting old. That's what's happened.

Well, I mean, it's inevitable. We all are. And I think that especially for people of, like, our age, it's like, we didn't really grow up wanting to have muscle. We thought smaller was better, and now I think we're paying the price of that. And it's not kind of as you hinted at before, it's not really about aesthetics even. It's about health span, it's about lifespan, it's about risk of falling and the subsequent decline in our health.

With that, one in two women will have an osteoporotic fracture after the age of 50. I mean, that's insane.

A 50?

Yeah. After 50, 1 and 2 will have some kind of osteoporotic fracture. I mean, come on.

Right? That's absolutely crazy and very, very preventable. Yeah, absolutely. I kind of want you to go back to the grip strength conversation. It's something that I personally have been working on. Oh, I love it.

If you're listening to this, this is a hand grip dynamometer available on Amazon for like, $30. And what's really interesting about these is you can do a simple grip strength. I wish every medical office would do this right I'd love to see a medical office. Never use a scale again because it's not what you weigh, it's what your weight's made up of. Everything should be related to body composition. We know that you're better off being overweight with more muscle and more fat than lean with not enough muscle. So we really have to focus on strength and muscle first and then fat, which is the opposite of what graduate school was teaching me. They were like, don't lift weights till you lose the weight. I completely didn't listen. I was like, I'm not listening to you. Because muscle is a metabolic Spanx. It holds everything in tighter and boosts your metabolism. But a great starting point is with a hand grip dynamometer. This actually was my wake up call because I started lifting weights at 16 with the football players in the gym because girls didn't have a gym. And so I've always lifted weights. But a couple years ago, I had trouble unscrewing a lid for the first time ever. And I didn't think about it the first time, but the second, third time I was like, what is going on here? Because handed over to my husband or my son and they're like, oh, here you go. I'm like, this is not happening to me. And so that's where a hand grip dynamometer comes in, because it's going to give you. You do it to each side three times. And you do that for two reasons. Number one, so you can get your best average, but number two, you also want to look at how you are between your two sides because it turns out that if you are not close within like 5% of either side, if you're 10% or more different, you actually. It could be an early warning sign for dementia, so.

Wow.

Yeah. But it's also great. You check in once a month with the handgrip dynamometer. But if you feel like you're not resting well, your HRV's declining, you may be over training. You can actually see it in your hand grip too. But what you want to see is you getting up to the highest 75th percentile. Like you want to be in that top 25th percentile, not the bottom one for hand grip dynamometer. Right. Because it's a proxy for overall strength.

When I try to do a farmer's carry, which you're supposed to be able to carry 75% of your body weight for a minute of time at least, I'm like, still working up to that. And this is something I work on consistently, so I don't Think people have any idea how difficult this is?

Now when you say 75%, you mean you. Because what I generally will do is say, hey, take your body weight and take 50% of that and then do half of that and you chance. So for me, 147, 70, 35 in each hand is kind of where I go. That's if you can do that, we're good.

Oh, then I'm good.

Yeah.

Okay. I was aiming for 75% more better.

But if you can take your weight, cut it in half and then cut it in half again, those are your dumbbells in each hand and walk around, I'm like, that is not the point. Right. It's not the gripper, it's doing a hang. It's going and doing pull ups. I love those assisted pull up machines. They're, they're a great start. But really doing pull ups or just hanging or doing a flexed arm hang, it's doing the things that are functional. Right? Yeah.

The function is what we want to maintain. The everyday movements that we do, the everyday tasks that we have to do, we need to be able to do those weighted and continue as we kind of evolve and age. One kind of thing I wanted to point out, and this is just extrapolating this data, is loss of muscle strength is the primary cause of falls. Falls are the number one cause of injury related deaths in older adults. So both of those again, just like you said, totally able to be influenced if we just do the proper things.

Now, do the work. And here's the thing, if you are doing the work, then you're going to have better bone density too. I look at bone density kind of like blood sugar and it drives me nuts that we are still like looking at blood sugar and not looking at fasting insulin. I know you are looking at fasting insulin, but it's the same thing. Like blood sugar's a lagging indicator, bone mineral density is a lagging indicator. If your muscle mass is good, your bone mineral density, unless there's something really bizarre going on, is gonna be good. And so it all goes together. If you're going to the gym, you're doing functional movement. Cause you're training to get better at life, not to train to get better at a leg extension machine. So you're doing the squats so you can get off the toilet, you're doing overhead presses so you can put stuff in an overhead compartment. Those things also require core. They require all this synchronicity between muscles and nerves talking. And they require balance. Yes, important.

So Important in terms of health span. If you could choose only three things to improve or address as we age, what would yours be?

So first thing is probably not what you think I'm going to say. So I always like to throw a total curveball. I love it. But I think having amazing relationships with people who are as fit or fitter than you. So true. Someone asked me once at a talk, they go, how do I make sure that once I get to where I want to be, I stay there, I go find fitter friends. That is so true. Right? Because then you look around like, in case in point. I decided a couple years ago that I really needed to do yoga. And so I get my husband to come with me and we start doing yoga at LA Fitness. And it's the old people's class yoga where we are like the spring chickens in the class and it's like a lot of old men. And I'm thinking, I am so good at this. Like, I'm an amazing yoga. I should be a yoga instructor. Heck, then we're in San Diego for the summer. We go to and San Diego's serious about their yoga. I don't pay any attention. I just go, oh, this place is close by us. It was a core yoga and there's a class at the right time. I didn't look at what it was. It was a hot yoga, 90 minute advance, like, kill it. I didn't bring water, I didn't bring a towel. We are like, it's like an ice skating rink on my mat. Tim's looking at me and I'm like, we gotta get outta here. He goes, no, we are staying. Good job, Tim. Yeah. He's like, oh, no. Well, he's so competitive too. Anyhow, it made me realize, like, you never want to go to the class and be the best person in class. You want to be the one who's like, oh my gosh, like, look at that poor girl over there. Right? So. And it's the same with your friends. Think if like all your friends were fit and doing all these amazing things and eating healthy and like, then naturally you just start doing that. So that's my first one is do that. The next one is, and I just saw it today in the news, that we're going to start changing the dietary guidelines on protein. It's like, well, about flipping time change what, 40, 50 years ago. And we know that as we age, we have this phenomenon that hits. I found out it's because at first I was like, well, maybe it was not happening to me. Because I've always been active. No, it's aging. It's insulin resistance. It's fatty infiltrate in the muscle. So it's being sedentary. There are a variety of different factors that can hit it, but any of those factors will cause something called anabolic resistance. Which means it is harder for you to take protein and resistance training and build muscles. So you actually need to do more, not less of both of these. And couple that with. We're aging and we're not digesting as well. So.

Hormones.

Me? Yeah, hormones. You're not having as much of the anabolic support of hormones. I'm assuming most people listening are on hrt. I'm a huge fan of hrt. I was just fortunate. Like the minute my hormones went down, I was on it. I never was not. I didn't do the let's suffer for a year or two and make sure this is really happening. You don't have to be miserable. You could just go to McCall's clinic and that doesn't have to happen to you.

Exactly. Move through the process the whole time effectively.

Right. Like hello, why would you. You think about that and could you imagine if your body was really struggling to produce insulin? You go, let's just wait it out. No, that would never happen. Nor would you just give a one size fits all dose. Cuz this is the dose. Like that would not happen either. And shout out. Because the other piece of that pie that I feel like people miss is if your thyroid's not working well. And it just this weekend when I was doing this event, someone was talking about being on hrt. They'd never check their thyroid. I'm like, how'd they never check your thyroid? How can you have your hormones balanced if your thyroid's not working well, you know you can't. Moreover, you're not going to be able to build muscle. Well, I think of thyroid and estrogen as really mission critical for helping you build that muscle. And all of these things really are what's going to impact your resting energy expenditure. So back over to that. But of course, if you don't have protein on board, you don't have the essential amino acids that you need in order to build muscle either. So first thing is getting optimal protein on board every day. Because we don't have a storage unit for protein. Store fat. We can store carbs. Protein. Nope. You're just gonna rip down some muscle.

Absolutely. I want to change topics a little bit and move to body composition versus weight loss. Like shifting our body composition versus simply just trying to shed fat. I want you to give us a little bit of JJ insight into that.

Gosh. I still have to use the terms weight loss, because people, that's what people look at. But when you really dig into this, my whole approach now is before you even think about weight loss or fat loss, first thing that you should be doing is optimizing protein, making sure that you are moving, getting at least those 8,000 steps every single day, and adding in resistance training and focusing on starting to build muscle before the. Before you start to look at tearing down fat. If you look at GLP1s and their mechanism of action, they can actually block myostatin and help you build muscle. So that's actually not what's causing the muscle loss. It's the poorly designed diet by someone who's not doing this correctly. Amen and right. I mean, it's obvious. Like, you can look at all of the research. It's clear in there. So that's why we first focused on getting that muscle metabolically active. Because if you just go and say, I want to lose weight, I go, great. If we're on a talk show, game show, and you want to lose a lot of weight, because I actually had to do this, getting people ready for some films and doing some reality shows, the best thing we could do is have you get dehydrated and sit on the couch. So you lose a lot of muscle and you'll lose a lot of weight, but you lose a lot of muscle and you just made yourself worse, not better. It's like someone who's losing weight but not losing their waist. They just made themselves worse, not better. If we could just get rid of scales, only use bioimpedance scales or DEXA machines. So we're only looking at body composition with a heavy focus on prioritizing muscle mass. So that's in the upper 25th percentile of your age. Compile comparing that, of course, with grip strength to make sure it's quality muscle. And then starting to look at losing body fat. You'll lose it, right? If you've got more muscle, you're going to have better resting energy expenditure, you're going to have better insulin sensitivity. Your muscles are contracting. They're releasing these messengers all throughout your body, telling your body to burn fat, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce inflammation, build muscle. And then if you can do that and throw in a little caloric restriction without changing your activity level, then you'll lose fat while holding onto our building muscle. And that's what we want to do. We want to recomp we actually don't.

Want to weigh ourselves at all. Like let's just, I mean definitely, as you said, like look at muscle versus fat, but not simply weight. Because the reality is that when we start building muscle in and of itself, that can be triggering the number on the scale because muscle is much, much more dense than fat. And so the number on the scale is not actually what matters at all.

So don't use a regular scale, use a bioimpedance scale. I, I have a couple different ones I like and they report to your phone. So you can just get on the scale. You don't have to look because you don't do it. Like you weigh in every day. But don't look at it because you'll make yourself insane. Like my husband will get on the scale all throughout the day. What are you doing? And no, you can't count your evening weight as your weight. He actually, when we did all of this work, he ended up, I'm like, okay, now you're getting too lean, so stop. Like we gotta up your calories. But so he'll try to weigh himself at night. I go, honey, that doesn't work. That is so. But if you can just track it. So at the one time a week, you look at your numbers, you go, is my total body water going up? That is a proxy for, I'm adding fat free mass, which is a proxy for skeletal mass. Is my body fat going down? The reality is if you're really in a focused recomping place, you might lose 1/2 to 1% of your body weight a week. That's about what you could lose fat wise. And you may put on a pound of muscle a month. And when I decided a couple years ago I was going in to get a dexa, I spent a couple months really focused on putting on muscle, put on £4. And I thought now this is kind of a mental thing that I have and I'm glad I did it. Cause I thought, God, this is, this is interesting because I know better and it's triggering me. Even though I have a biompedom scale, I could see what's going on, but I'm still like, you know, so that's why we really have to focus on this. Because it's the muscle that is going to make you have an amazing life. The muscle's going to hold everything in tighter. And it's not the idea that muscle's going to make us bulky. Muscle doesn't, it's tight, right?

Like one pound a month if we're lucky. When we're working really hard, we're not going to become bodybuilders overnight.

By the way. You're never a bodybuilder. You want to be a bodybuilder. It is a full time job.

Full time job, yeah.

And likely you'll need to do steroids and that's not me. And it's not you either. And I work out, I work out hard, but I don't work out a lot. The cool thing is you can build muscle. If you're listening to this and you're going oh I forgot to work out my whole life, don't worry about it. You can build muscle at any age. We now know a 65 year old can put on muscle just like an 85 year old can. When in fact if you never have really lifted weights, you actually will do better get have better results quicker than if I started to try to up my program. So interesting.

I didn't know that.

It's called newbie gains.

Wow. I love it. Tell me, for women who maybe are just starting their muscle building journey, what would you say? As a general recommendation, most women should aim for in terms of protein intake.

The minimum should be 0.7 grams per pound of target body weight. There is a caveat here with this. So first of all you gotta figure out what is my ideal weight, right? Which that for a whole lot of people is a bizarre kind of thing too. And so first if is just get a feel for that. You're probably going to shift it as you go but figure out your target body weight. What we know is that 0.7 is really going to give you the best muscle proteins. If that's from animal protein, I'd rather you err on the higher side. So 1 gram per pound of target body weight. And if you're more plant based, definitely err on the higher side. Because plants have the essential amino acid profile to build plants and animals have it to build animals. And we're not a plant. If someone's doing serious recomping with some caloric restriction, I might even take em up to 1.5. I'm not worried about too much. That's not our problem. There's so much weird concern about too much and it's gonna do something. Your kidneys actually show me one study that shows that protein intake harms the kidneys. It's only an issue if someone's got kidney issues. It actually shows that it's the opposite when you have good kidney function. And what we now know is that we do not know the Upper limit of protein intake. And I also hear, well, if you eat too much protein, it'll turn to fat. Unlikely. The amount of work protein has to do to turn to fat, you take about 25% of the calories from protein. It's the most thermic of all the macronutrients. Just to get it to go and be digested and assimilated and do muscle proteins. If you've got excess, then in order for it to get stored as fat, it's gonna be turned into sugar. If it can't be used there or stored as glycogen, then it would be turned into fat. More likely, your body's gonna take the fat you ate and store it as fat. Or the carbs you ate. If you didn't do some workouts and move them into fat so you're not eating a bunch of protein, it's magically poofing into fat.

I view protein as the foundation to our diet. It's where we should start. Even in terms of meal. Like, I always tell people, eat your protein first. Me too. I'm curious. Do you Same. It is the foundational piece. And in as far as tell me tips on eating it throughout the day, Any sort of unique approach to that?

Yeah. I actually bought the domains of eat protein first. I love it. Because the reason was I watch so many people. I like to watch people eat in grocery shop. Those are things that fascinate me. And you'll watch a woman, literally, I was doing a lecture on all of this. And then I went out to dinner with some of the people, and one of the gals ordered, like there were appetizers at the table. Wine, bread, blah, blah, blah. And I'm watching everybody eating everything. And the appetizers were not carpaccio and sashimi. It was like, whatever. Garbage, carbs, fat, et cetera. We were in New Orleans too. So I watched this woman have wine, eat appetizers, have a salad that was literally a sundae. Cause it had dried fruit and glazed nuts and all the garbage. And then she'd ordered eggplant. And I'm looking. I'm like, now she's in the front row during my talk. And I'm like, right? She goes, you're probably gonna protein shame me. I go, no, I'm gonna give you part of my steak. And she goes, but I'm so full. And I'm thinking, first of all, that eggplant parmesan has far more calories than my steak does. Let's be real. Like, that is a. And do you know how much eggplant can absorb. It's like a sponge. It's like an olive oil fat bomb sponge. And then they put breading there. If she'd sat down and had maybe her appetizer was carpaccio, which is great because of the creatine content in it, or prawns or something like that, and then had her protein first and then ate vegetables, she'd be great. And she probably wouldn't want anything else because she'd be satiated. I always look at protein and go, not only are you not hungry, you're also not craving. So it's satiated and satisfied. So that's why I look at it. And I especially started saying, eat protein first, because we had the word out there going, no, you have to eat your vegetables first.

People get very offended when I say to eat their protein first.

I was so offensive. Food, so religious, like, so funny. And you look at it and go, okay, I hear all this. Eat veggies first, have apple cider vinegar, and then you can have a muffin or a donut. I go, we've missed the plot, right? What if you're eating correctly? You don't need to do these hacks for your blood sugar. Right.

Because your blood sugar is resilient.

Yeah. Don't eat crap. And then you. And by the way, every once in a while, if you have a blood sugar spike because you ate some kiwi at a. Like this. What happened to me? So I was at a buffet and I was like, kiwi in the Maldives. My cabinet is like £12 of kiwi. And then my blood sugar went up to 200 and it came right back down again. Is that gonna, like, do I have a problem? No, I do not have a problem. I've got great blood sugar control. Right. So it's. How long does it stay? Elevates the area under the curve.

And, like, tune into your body and see how you feel after you eat the bread and the mini salad and the eggplant parmesan. Cause I can guarantee you that lady left and wanted to go nap in her hotel room. Versus if you start with protein, you fuel your body to continue going and functioning throughout the day. Do you think protein is more important for women in perimenopause? Menopause? Like, does the demand and importance shift as we age?

I think it definitely, like, those statistics are starting at around age 30. But I think it really, as we get into perimenopause, that's when we really have to focus on this for sure. But I Don't want people to fear carbs. Because I think the other side of it is like, to me, you eat the perfect diet if there is one. Because I don't believe there's like we're all n of ones. But I think figure out your protein, whatever that is that works best for you. I tend to do really well with red meat and wild fish. Fish and then go to vegetables, loads of non surgical vegetables, little bit of fruit, little bit of like, you know, whole. This is where the whole becomes super important. Things like lentils or legumes, just see how you feel with that kind of stuff. But I think the protein plus plants is the way to go.

Mm, agreed. Shifting gears just a little bit, I wanna pick your mind on supplements. So are there specific supplements, nutrients that we should be taking to fuel our ability to build musc function at our highest level? Give me your experience on that.

So if I could go back in time, you know how they always ask you, what would you tell your 20 year old self? I would tell my 20 year old self, take creatine. And basically I used to take people on these field trips. I used to work out down at Goldsteam in Venice, literally before there were even trainers, right? And everyone there was huge. I loved it. Cause I felt like this little petite thing. People would always go, you're a bodybuilder. I go, have you been around bodybuilders? Because I look like an emaciated waif around these people. They could like bench press me with one arm. But they were all, they were all on steroids, let's be honest. I mean, but they were clearly taking creatine in all these like thermogenic aids. But I equated creatine with big bros and big gals too. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want that. And it was until a couple years ago, as I was really digging through supplements and going, all right, what would be the perfect powerful aging routine? It was sort of like, where have I been? Under a rock? So our body produces about a gram of creatine a day through methionine, arginine and glycine. Our, our liver and kidneys make this, and then we turn over. We have about 120 grams of this on our body. We're supposed to get the rest from food, like a gram or two more a day. And basically that would mean that you would need to eat about a pound of pretty rare or raw fish or meat or two pounds of cooked. So you look at this and go, okay, here's Here's a supplement that really isn't a supplement. Like, I look at specific things like omega 3s, vitamin D, vitamin D that our body's supposed to be making. But we know so many of us are deficient in omega 3s that are so critical for our cell membranes and cell fluidity, and creatine. These are the orthomolecular super important things we must have, creatine being a foundational one. So I those to me, when you think of supplements, I think of supplements more like things like ashwagandha or rhodiola. I don't think of them as these core things that we should have been getting already or getting in our diet. Our food sucks now and we're just not getting. So you look at what creatine does. The biggest thing that does its core, we have creatine phosphate. This is our fast energy system. It helps us recycle and make ATP. ATP is like our body's energy currency. So by helping our body make energy cheat, we're gonna be able to have better energy all throughout the day. But it also, because 95%'s in the muscle, 5%'s in the brain. Also helps with brain focus, it helps with traumatic brain injury, it helps with dementia, it helps with sleep deprivation. It's crazy huge for brain. Also helps with bone mineral density, it helps with skin, it helps with your immune system. They're now looking at it with long Covid and I would argue, oh, wow. Issues that now we know have happened because of the vaccinations creating long Covid. So all of that, you look at it and go, this should be in like, let's get the fluoride out and put the creatine in the water.

Wow.

Right? Right.

I've been taking. I. I admittedly have been late to the creatine game. And I started your creatine, or what's called Chia Teen a couple months ago.

Isn't that so cute? Oh, he did. I want women to get, like, stop being scared. Right.

I. I love that.

I know McCall like all the research and I admit I was saying the same thing. And I'm like, embarrassed because I usually, I like to be openly, critically open minded, you know, skeptical. But I was doing what everybody else was doing. Well, creatine's the most studied. It's actually the most. Creatine monohydrate is the most studied supplement of all time.

Interesting.

Monohydrates, the carrier. Creatine's the important thing. It's like magnesium. Magnesium is the mineral and Then there's all these different ways you could chelate it, right? Glycinate, oxide, citrate. So creatine monohydrate. It turns out that it's about 15% absorbed. And when they did the absorption studies, they did it with a very small dose. And then they extrapolated, which is, you can't do that in solubility studies. So what we know about creatine is that creatine monohydrate in about 76% of people. Anyhow, this study shows that people feel bloated. They show a couple pounds of weight gain, and I didn't really have an option. So I was pushing out to everyone. I was actually even selling creatine monohydrate. I'd never gotten so much blowback from a supplement in my life. And in fact, even friends of ours who are physicians were like, I'm not going to take it. A year ago, I was lecturing at a medical conference, and there was a creatine company there, and the guy had come from toxicology. He actually was in the sports doping industry, where he was drug testing athletes to make sure they weren't doping. And that's when it came up. These athletes were like, well, we can't use these drugs, so what can we do? And they were complaining about the side effects of creatine. So he was like, I'm gonna make a better creatine. And so that's what he set out to do. It took him a decade. And so I met him last year, and I'm like, yeah, right. I go to his place in Nebraska. It's the only USA made creatine. And sure enough, like, the guy nailed it. They did all of their solubility studies. It's 99% absorbed. You need a very small dose. And it just makes sense. Like I said at the beginning, we need maybe a gram a day. Like, we sh. We make a gram a day, probably need another gram a day. We'll get some from our diet, maybe two. Why would we need to take 5 grams of creatine monohydrate? If we absorb at all, we wouldn't need that. We'd need a gram. So. So I'm going totally. The math doesn't add up with your arguments. Everybody out there arguing this. And it's so interesting in the sports science world how much people are just, like, obnoxious.

Well. And they just regurgitate, right?

I'm like, but the math doesn't add up. Let's just question it. The bottom line for me was I Looked at this, I went, every woman needs to be on this supplement. Every woman is worried about losing muscle, becoming sarped. I believe that when we really have a way to look at sarcopenia, because how can you see it on a scale? And no one's doing grip strength. They are like, well, 3 to 11% of 50 plus year olds have sarcopenia. I go, no one's looking for it. Right. When they start looking for it, it's.

Going to be the inverse of that percentage.

Yeah, it can be horrible because only 19% of adults are doing the recommended two days a week of 30 minutes, twice a week of resistance training. Wow. Which is the bare minimum. Totally. And who knows, they're probably the people that I see in the gym who I've controlled myself to stay away from because they didn't ask for my help with the little pink dumbbells, you know, all sorts of weird stuff. I'm like, that's not going to do anything.

Right. That's definitely not building muscle.

No, that's not building muscle. And the worst thing is a lot of people will do that and go, I went to the gym today. And then they go out and have like a frozen yogurt or something. Garbage. Right. Anyhow.

Well, I know my experience with yours has been one of it's probably too early to notice any real shift in muscle, but absolute shift in my cognitive function, like on days that I take it, basically I feel it within a few hours, especially if I'm sleep deprived. I go from being low function to normal function despite sleep deprivation. And I, I'm going to absolutely use your hack for jet lag in creatine for sure. You can briefly share that as well if you want, but I'm going to be taking that on myself.

Yeah, I tell people to do somewhere between 750 milligrams to a gram. I put it in with taurine and magnesium because I was digging through all the research and I found some studies that showed that both magnesium and creatine help with exercise performance and all day performance. But when you put em together it's like an exponential effect. So I'm like, okay, that's good. And then taurine actually helps make creatine kinase, which is the enzyme you need to basically make phosphocreatine. So I'm like, all right, well this all makes sense. And we don't get enough of either of those nutrients. So let's put it all together. So you take like 750 milligrams of this. It's A foundational dose. You just do that every day. If you are doing a big workout under more stress, going through surgery, jet lagged, hurt your head, brain injury of any sort, dementia, then you're going to kick it up. And I'd read about this. I read about sleep deprivation. I didn't find jet lag. And I went, but I was going to Europe. And I go, well, this should work.

Mm.

And literally I went to, from, I forget, like, I guess Florida to London, over to Boston, over to Spain, back to Florida, over to Canada. And I'm like, I have to sign this trip. And it was just like crazy shifting over like a week here and then over there. And I'm one of those people that I go, three hours difference and I'm a disaster. And it's just not a thing anymore. Like, jet lag is no longer an issue for me.

Wow. I cannot wait for my next trip because it robs you of so much of your joy and time.

It does, but it doesn't have to. So, yeah, it's a huge one.

I love it. A couple more questions for you, specifically geared towards our peri and menopausal women out there is when you're already in perimenopause. When you're already in menopause. I know our testosterone's declined. We're usually having some hormonal issues between estrogen and progesterone. Is it too late for these women to get started with strength training or have the ability to adequately build muscle with strength training?

It is so awesome that you can actually do this at any age. When I was in doctoral school at USC, we had people coming in in their 80s and 90s.

That is amazing.

So it's never too late. Like the best time, I think, is for us. When I was in school, we were always taught that kids should not lift weights. But how are they doing gymnastics? It's the same thing. What's different? What's different between a push up, a pull up jumping and weights? Same difference. Right? So that was wrong. We all now know that's wrong. So when's the best time to start? Like right away, today. And the next time is now. Right? And what we know about this is, and how I walk people through it is again, I get their steps down first. Because if you don't have someone tracking their activity quite often, they'll start working out and they'll start doing a lot less because our body likes to conserve. So we want to make sure we keep the steps up no matter what. And then we add the resistance training on top of it. And when I'm having someone start with a resistance training program, I literally start first with just their movement pattern.

Okay.

Because the ultimate limiter is going to be your form. Like, when people talk about going to failure, the failure is when you break form. It's not when you can't lift the weight, it's when you can't lift the weight in good form. And so that might be. You're just doing bodyweight squats. You might be doing pushups against a wall or a table or on your hands and knees. Very simple things. You might be carrying around water bottles first around the house. So very simple stuff to start, and then you build on that. Because when you're first starting out with resistance training, the very first thing that you're doing is teaching your muscles and nerves how to talk to each other. And then after that, your connective tissue starts to strengthen up. People do not get injured. Like, when people talk about tearing a muscle, it's not the muscle belly that tears. It's the muscle tendon junction that tears. That's where collagen is. Fantastic. Collagen is not going to help you build muscle, but it's going to help you build the connective tissue and keep that strong. And that is where the problems start. So that's the next thing. You won't even start to see muscle size. Like, you'll start to feel stronger literally the next week. Every time you go to the gym when you're first starting, you're like, I'm stronger, I'm stronger, I'm stronger. Which is so awesome. But after that, you want to. You'll start to see, like, about six weeks in, you might start to see actual muscle being built, but again, it's kind of like watching grass grow.

Yeah, right.

I mean, that's why when people are worried about getting bulky, I go, I've only ever seen someone get bulky when they don't work out and they sit on the couch. That's when they bulky. So you go in the weight room, you go into a gym. And I used to work out at a gym in Palm Desert where one side you'd walk down a glass corridor, and one side was the cardio room and one side was the weight room. And it's funny, because four years I worked out this gym and people wouldn't be in the weight room. I literally saw one woman on the elliptical doing a crossword puzzle. Now, I guess it's better than her sitting there eating Doritos, but it was. But I Was like going, you're doing a crossword puzzle on the elliptical. And I would look at those people and I go, are they not noticing that nothing's changing? In fact, they look like they're getting worse, not better. Then you'd look in the weight room and these people kept looking better and better. And the average age in that gym was about 55, 60. And the weight room, I mean, they kept looking better.

Like, do you see what's happening here?

Right?

You have choices, right? No, it's true. And I am glad. I think society in general is coming around to that concept now. Finally, we are beginning to realize the value of building muscle and strength training. And hopefully it'll change the future of our health span.

Right. I feel like I got in trouble in graduate school because all we were supposed to do was cardio research.

You were the black sheep then. But a woman, way ahead of her time.

I had to find the one advisor who would sponsor me because everything was sponsored by Precor and we had, you know, treadmills and ellipticals back then. If you couldn't work out for at least 30 minutes doing cardio in your target heart rate zone, you shouldn't even bother because you wouldn't get into your fat burn. It was the dumbest stuff. The dumbest stuff.

Wow.

Seriously.

Yeah, I know.

Sorry, everybody.

I'm so glad we've evolved.

Right.

Tell everyone where. If they're not familiar with you and your work, tell everyone where they can find you. I'd love for you to mention some of your books as well, because I feel like they're cram packed full of valuable information. And then I know you have a freebie for us that I'd love for you to share about too.

Well, I do have a podcast that we have, so well beyond 40 is the podcast that you will need to be on, obviously. And then everything is@jjvirgin.com it was interesting. So the Virgin Diet is written about food intolerances. And when I wrote it 14 years ago, it was. People didn't believe there were such a thing. And now it's like, wow, right? I know. They're like, there's not a thing. I'm like, really? Because I'm looking at these tests, there's blood markers. Yeah. And I think it's important. Where the Virgin Diet comes into play now is if you are increasing your protein, you really need to be aware if you have leaky gut, because some of the protein sources that can be great here, like Greek style yogurt or egg and egg white Combos can be problematic if you have leaky gut. So that's what the virgin diet is written about. And then the sugar impact diet was after that because people were like, okay, I stopped eating all the gluten and, but now. And they just like, I can't quit the sugar. I'm like, really? And what I find is when you're eating more protein, you get a lot of the sugar cravings go away. So that's cool. So that's been great. I did create a challenge. This is a fun one. There was research that came out recently about vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. It's also known as exercise snacks. That showed the people who accumulated four and a half to ten minutes total of exercise snacks each day or vilpa done in one to two minute ver bursts lowered their all cause mortality and heart disease, stroke and diabetes cancer risk by 40 to 50%. Wow. Compared to people who didn't. And that's honestly another great place to start. Once you think of this, you've gotten your, your steps going so you make sure you get those. But think about just habit stacking. You got up in the morning, brushed your teeth, did air squats, you had breakfast, you did jumping jacks, you had lunch, you did some pushups and maybe some mountain climbers. So you just compile it all throughout the day and all of a sudden you look back a month later and you go, gosh, all I did was add 5 to 10 minutes a day and I've dropped some body fat and put on muscle.

I'm literally going to get that freebie myself. Because as much as I am great at going for walks and setting aside time, I do not move my body during the day. I am here in this chair all day.

You can do air squats. So what's interesting is this is what the research shows. And that's@jjvirgin.com snackchallenge what the research shows is that like a minute of air squats actually is the equivalent of 30 minutes of going out and walking in terms of what it's gonna do for your blood sugar response. So if you just connect eating with doing a little exercise snack, then you've got to like the, the impact for your blood sugar, but the impact for your metabolism. Like when I was co hosting this event this weekend, in the middle of it, like they had people in this TV audience for five hours straight. I'm like, wow. And at one point I'm looking, I'm like, okay, I think we need to get them up. Like now I'm wearing stilettos and a dress and I'm like, we everyone has to get up. And they were too. But we did air squats and it was great. And so here we are doing air squats. Now I'm out of breath, which is awesome. But you don't think you're like a minute of air squats and stilettos can take it out of you.

Hey, I bet that that's like a different form, too. So I'm sure it was hitting on new muscles.

Absolutely.

I've seen your heels. They're no joke. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. I think it's going to be enlightening for so many women. Grateful that you took the time and just for all of your work. I know it has changed millions of lives. I know it's changed my life personally. So I'm forever grateful for you and your mission. And I will put in the show notes for the freebie and of course, the links to JJ's information. Thanks for coming on today.

Great.