Dhru Purohit Show - The Top Weight Loss Do’s and Don’ts for Women 40+ with JJ Virgin

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough and InsideTracker. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with JJ Virgin to discuss her most impactful tips for losing weight, building muscle, and aging powerfully. JJ Virgin is a renowned health and fitness expert, bestselling author, and prominent media personality. With over three decades of experience in the field, she has become a trusted authority in nutrition, weight loss, and wellness. She is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: The Virgin Diet, The Virgin Diet Cookbook, JJ Virgin's Sugar Impact Diet, and JJ Virgin's Sugar Impact Diet Cookbook.  In this episode, Dhru and JJ dive into: -The do’s and don’ts of weight loss for women over 40 (1:28) -The benefits of having lean muscle mass (10:20) -Why too much healthy food is unhealthy (12:40) -The difference between weight loss and shifting your body composition (23:28) -The importance of tracking calories (28:35) -How to hit your target protein intake (33:06) -Where carbs and fiber fit into weight loss (46:18) -Thoughts on Ozempic (54:12) -Thoughts on the body positivity movement (1:02:08) -Thoughts on intermittent fasting as a vehicle for weight loss (1:07:13) -Doubling down on the basics: sleep, diet, exercise, and stress (1:13:24) -The worst way to start your morning (1:19:31) -Best and worst practices for lunchtime (1:22:50) -A practical approach to starting strength training (1:26:01) -The role of sleep and stress when not losing weight (1:46:31) -Where to follow JJ’s work (1:56:00) Also mentioned in this episode: -Well Beyond 40 Podcast -The Virgin Diet -The Virgin Diet Cookbook -JJ Virgin's Sugar Impact Diet -JJ Virgin's Sugar Impact Diet Cookbook For more on JJ Virgin, follow her on Instagram @jj.virgin, Facebook @JJVirginOfficial, YouTube @jjvirginvideos, or through her website, jjvirgin.com.  Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off plus a special gift with purchase, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's two ways I like to think of muscle and it helps a lot for women. Muscle is your metabolic spanks. So what does that mean? It holds everything in tighter, right? But it also supports a better metabolism because the muscle protein turnover that has to happen is so costly, it requires more energy on your body. If you're curious about the top do's and don'ts on the topic of weight loss and improved body composition, specifically for women 40 plus, today's episode is absolutely. for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's

guest is J.J. Virgin. Virgin is a celebrity nutrition expert and fitness Hall of Famer. She teaches clients, especially women 40 and over, how to break through food and carbohydrate intolerance so that they can finally lose the weight and radically transform their longevity the way that they deserve. J.J. is the author of four New York Times. J. J. J.J. is the author of four New York times bestsellers, including her mega hit, The Virgin Diet. And she's also the host of the top podcast, well beyond 40. Stay tuned for a fascinating conversation on body composition and weight loss with JJ Virgin. J.J. Virgin, welcome to the podcast. I want to jump right in. Today we're talking about weight loss, especially for women, and especially for women over 40. We're talking about all

the do's and especially the don'ts. Let's start off with the don'ts. Give us a list. Give us a list. of a few things that hinder weight loss for women over 40. Okay, well, here's the first one. Stop trying to lose weight. Like, what? And in fact, when you think about it, if your sole focus was to lose weight, what should you do? You should fast as much as possible, eat as little as possible, and move as little as possible. And you'll lose a lot of weight.

And you will damage your metabolism to the point it will be hard to come back from that. So we have to shift that focus from weight loss to improving what that weight is made up of. Because the reality is if you fix that, if you fix your metabolism, because a healthy body will lose fat and hold on to our build muscle, you have to get healthy to do that. You don't lose weight to get healthy. In fact, you can lose weight and really damage your metabolism. So if you shift that focus and improve that body composition, then fat loss becomes effortless. Let's talk about the number 40. Why are we having that conversation of at 40 and above?

What's going on in the body? Yeah, what happened? I still remember I was doing a down dog at my fitness and wellness studio and looking and going, whose thighs are those? What skin is going on there? What the heck, right? You know, what happens at 40? And it really probably happens a little younger than that, but I think we start to see it more at 40, 45, 50 is that we start to lose muscle if we are not actively working against it.

You know, I'm 60 and I'm fitter than I've ever been. So this doesn't have to be this sentence of doom. But if you don't actively work against this, starting at 40, we lose up to 1% of our muscle each year. That's actually not the worst part. 2 to 4% of our strength, 6% of our power. And I think we're focusing a lot now on muscle, which I'm thrilled about. I feel like my time has come as an exercise physiologist. But we're missing the big part, which is strength and power.

And I remember at age 50, I was going to unscrew a lid, and I couldn't unscrew it. I was always the lid unscrewer in the household. And all of a sudden I'm like, I can't unscrew this lid. What the heck is going on here? Like me, you know, the person who's lifted weights since I was age. 16 and I went I need to focus on strength and power. So it means the workouts that we did in our 20s and 30s need to shift dramatically along with our diet, of course. This episode is brought to you by bioptimizers. You know, I've had a bunch of experts on my podcast talk about the insane

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So just head over to insidetracker.com slash drew, dhrU to save today. That's inside, I-N-S-I-D-E tracker.com slash dh-R-U to save 20% today. Let's come back to this idea and do's and don'ts. I'm going to zigzag for a second. So give us a few more dues and don'ts when it comes to wait. loss, especially for women over 40. Yeah, and I was fortunate early on as I was paying my way through grad school and doctoral school to have all my clients were 40s and 50s.

And pretty even split between men and women. But what they were teaching me in school, I went, first I tried that with my clients, and it didn't work. And what were they teaching? Just so everybody knows. Oh, my gosh. But what's crazy is the stuff that we were taught back then is actually still around today. They taught us calories and calories out. And I like to say calories count, but it's clear from

the research that where they come from counts more. Like I literally had a doctor once tell one of my clients that it just was calories and calories out. She could eat all our calories from pie. She just needed to create a deficit. I'm like, yeah, not really, right? So it was calories and calories out. And you had to do cardio to lose the weight first before you did resistance training. That was the whole thing. In fact, everything in grad school, all of the research projects were based on cardio. And I was like, I am not doing my research project on cardio. Because as I realized it didn't work and I wasn't going to get paid to do to make people worse, right? I shifted the diet into protein first and I started doing loads and loads of resistance training. And the cardio I did

do was sprint training. And so my graduate projects were on resistance training and plyometrics. In fact, this is funny. A gal Tracy York and I over at Matrix were trying to design a plyometric class. But the problem was we couldn't take people past 10 to 12 minutes. And the classes all had to be at least 30 minutes. So we were like done. Because they would get sort of wiped out because they were so intense. They were done.

It was like you only needed what you're going to do plyometrics in power training. You're not doing that for 30 minutes and certainly not for 60. And everything back then, you look at it, even in the research subjects, in our lab at Cal State Northridge, everything was 30 minutes to 60 minutes because of the classes. And I was doing how to create strength the fastest. Well, you don't need 30 minutes to do that. You know, we were doing, how do you create quad strength the fastest? I don't need 30 minutes. I can do that in 5 to 10 minutes.

So it's, and everything was funded by pre-core. Treadmills and elliptical, right? So, I mean, there is, but that whole message of you need to get the weight off before you start lifting weights, it's still around, which is bizarre to me because if you want to drop fat, the single most important thing you could possibly do is resistance training. You'd put that as number one. Oh, heck yeah. No question. Because what is one of the reasons you're not losing fat? Well, probably two of them, metabolism.

like this is one of the big factors under our control and metabolism is muscle, right? And insulin sensitivity, fastest way you can improve insulin sensitivity besides sleep is muscle. Put on more high quality muscle. Just explain to people. Why is that? Why is that? So muscle, there's two ways I like to think of muscle and it helps a lot for women. Muscle is your metabolic spanks.

So what does that mean? It holds everything in tighter, right? but it also supports a better metabolism because the muscle protein turnover that has to happen is so costly it requires more energy on your body. We've all heard that. We all sort of like muscle takes more energy than fat. Well, why? It's that protein turnover that happens.

The other part is it's a sponge. It's a sugar sponge. It's an endocrine organ. The best place that we can put our carbs is in our muscles so that we can store them and use them when we need them. So it's going to help lower that blood sugar response. And then we have insulin improvement when we are like when those muscles are contracting. So we get better insulin sensitivity.

So if you just remember those two things, metabolic spanks, you know, sugar sponge, those are the key things that are really going to help with that long-term body composition improvement. Yeah. And going back to this idea that you shared earlier is that yes, calories matter, but the quality of them matters, I think one thing that a lot of healthy people, probably a lot of people that consider themselves healthy that are listening to this podcast, right? And of course, that's a spectrum. I think that one of the things that's making a little bit of resurgence is that it kind of was like for a while in the health industry, some folks, I'm not saying you, I don't know where you stood on this, we're kind of

saying, well, calories don't really matter. But I think that a lot of people that were in the health space found themselves because they don't track or they've never tracked before. So they don't have a sense. They know how to look at a nutrition label, but they might be eating keto cookies or an Oreo gluten-free cookie or they might even be having, you know, this dressing that has a ton of olive oil instead of using, you know, two tablespoons or using five. Not that that in itself would throw it off, but all these little decisions could add up. And many people didn't know that they were eating, you know, 20, 30, 40 percent above what their calorie needs were based on their activity and their baseline, and they were scratching their head thinking, well, I'm eating clean.

I'm eating clean-ish. I'm eating clean junk food, but I'm still not losing weight. Too much healthy foods unhealthy. It is. Talk more about that. You know, so what you just said is so clear that we underestimate our calories by about 40%. That's on average. Most people do that.

Uh-huh. Yeah. And guess what? Even the health experts do. Maybe not that high. But I have now become obsessive about having people track, not forever. Well, some things. Like I think weight, and we'll talk about that.

But tracking your calories and understanding where they're coming from and really look at your macros and understanding what five ounces of lean fillet look like is so important. And if you've never done it, you have no clue. How would you? right? And so I think that, and the research is really clear on people who track. And the great example is my husband, right, who when he did his Dexa scan, I'm like, that's it. We're going to make sure you're getting the protein you need. And he was so resistant to tracking. And just explain Dexa. Not everybody's familiar like that. So I was fortunate when I was 39 to do a Dexa scan. I think that

starting at age 30, I actually would love to see at age 20 because when are you going to be able to fix your bone mass, not at age 60. Like the idea that we use a dexas scan for bone health at age 60 when that ship's sailed, right, is silly. So a dexas scan used to be something we used for bone mineral density. And, you know, something that they would do with women, postmenopausal women, again, a little late, right? Trying to make sure that they weren't headed down the path of osteoporosis. But like we, at that point, you can't unscramble an egg. It's really hard to get more bone mass on at a time like that versus when you're in your peak years, your teens and 20s. Still doable.

It's still doable. It's tougher. And there's all this behavior change that you have to get. Somebody's had 60 years of not working out. Right. It's a little bit tougher to get them to start working out at that time. Yeah. So I did a Dexed at 39.

And what had changed was they didn't just do bone anymore. They had the software so they could look at everything else. And so they would look at because formally, you would do a bone. bio-impedant scale, and I think this is an important thing to have at home, and no, it's not as accurate as a dexia. What was it again? It's a bio-impedant scale. So is that the type or is it the brand?

Well, I'll tell you some brands that I like. Okay. But basically, here's the bigger concept. The bigger concept is that we must know what your weight is made up of. Just knowing your weight is like total cholesterol 20 years ago. We don't know. I mean, if it's some obscene number, you'd go, huh. But you could have a total cholesterol that looks high, but when you unpack it, your fractions are

amazing, and it's a non-issue. You could have a weight that looks higher or low, but when you really look at what that weight's made up of, you go, oh, this is fantastic. So what a dexa allows us to do is look at what that weights made up of. And not just looking at body fat and fat-free mass, because I think we tend to focus on that too much and not enough on the fat-free mass and where the fat is. In fact, 20 years ago, I tried to work on norms for fat-free masks. So, like, where are the norms for this?

How do we know how much skeletal muscles someone should have? Is fat-free mass the same thing as lean muscle mass? They're slightly different, but it doesn't really matter. The bottom line is we got two things. We've got fat and we've got everything else. What a Dex is going to tell you is a couple important things, not just how much fat you have, but where is that fat? Is that fat visceral adipose tissue? That's the scary damaging fat. You write the pro-inflammatory,

or is that the fat on your thighs, you know, your glutes, right? So where's the fat? And then looking at fat-free fat-free mass, what is that? How much skeletal muscle you have? Do you have a filet or do you have rib-eyes for skeletal muscle? Because we've got to have that quality skeletal muscle in there, too. And then it will also tell you, is it even? Like, is your right arm? And your left arm, are they even right leg, left leg? Do we need to do some rebalancing in there as well? And so I will give you the great example. I'm really thrilled that Tim, my husband's letting me talk about this, but I'd done a Dexite age 39.

Now, I will say, a genetic misfit. Women have 10 to 12% essential fat, men 3 to 5%. That's the fat we must have on our body to survive, right? So women have higher body fat, obvious reasons that we need to have more body fat. We've got more fat receptors on our thighs so we can store more fat so that we can breastfeed, et cetera, right? So at 39, I was 13.9%. Now, I'd been as low as 10%. I used to work out at Gold's Gym. I was like, that was my world, right? But I'm a naturally very lean person. I'm more of a mesomorph. Tim, my husband's much more of an ectomorph, could go into the skinny fat place very easily.

So we go to this dexia when I'm 59 because I've decided that for my 60th birthday, getting inspired by Dr. Peter Atia in the centenary decathlon, and then hearing our buddy Dr. Mark Hyman talk about how if you have a positive association with aging, you can live seven and a half years longer. I'm like, that's it. I'm going to get my best shape for 60. So I go in and my body fat is 13.9% same weight as when I was in my at 39, which is an important metric because a lot of people will say, I'm the same weight I was 20 years ago. And I go, well, unless your body composition is the same and it was good back then, that's not necessarily good thing. Because we're tending to, again, lose that muscle mass as we age and put on fat mass. So here's Tim. He's basically been the same weight. forever. And his deck says 25%. Now, you wouldn't have looked at him and gone,

you know, he looks like a skinny fat. He carried it well. But I was like, this is not okay, honey. Like 25% is not okay for you. And back when I was in doctoral school, we were taught that that level for a man was insulin resistance. Now, it's weird because what we were taught were ideal body fats in the 80s are no longer what they're talking about as the norms. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure physiologically we didn't change. So why are we making it acceptable to have higher body fat? But I will tell you, if that body fat, like for him, it was stored on his legs and butt, very different than a usual male body fat, it's safe body fat. He may not have liked it, but it wasn't visceral adipose tissue, which is super dangerous. The belly fat. The belly fat. And it's,

It's interesting belly fat. Early on, I used to go to people's houses and I take their scale out, which I would never do now, but I take their scale out. I now have a biomedic scale and I would do a tape measure and skin folds. And what I would look at is I do body fat through biomedes. I compare it to skin folds and I know the disparity plus their waist measurement would tell me how much internal fat they had because there was no way to really figure it out. Right.

Just so everybody knows, skinfolds is a process of somebody didn't have access to a dexia. and Jim still do it. And you can only get a dexadone really once a year, right? No, no, no. You could do a dexia once a month, but it wouldn't make any sense to. I think twice a year. Which is the one that has a lot more radiation with it. It's not the dexas.

Is it the other one maybe? I don't know. Dexas. Okay, sorry. Not a dexia. But here's a thing. Skinfold is another way of looking at the... Skinfolds, if you're metabolically healthy, are fantastic. Yeah.

But since there's only 6.8% of the population metabolically healthy and probably people who are trying to improve their body composition are trying to improve their metabolic health. it's not going to work because if you've got a lot of internal fat, that fat, you'll actually can look like you're really lean. I remember I had a woman who literally looked like a potato on stilts. You know, she had so much visceral adipose tissue. She had very skinny arms and legs and very low skinfold fat on our abdomen because it was all internal. So you could look at that and go, okay, obviously if your body fat's high by a biopedin scale, which is mimicking ADEXA but not as good,

and your skin folds are low, we got a problem, right? because that fat's in your in your visceral adipose tissue. So the cool thing with the dexia is it is the gold standard. What you then can do is come home with that information, get yourself an inexpensive biomepedon scale for home knowing it's not going to be as accurate, but you can, you know, corroborate the results. And you're just looking for the relative change. And so an in-body machine or a Tanita machine, especially if it's segmental, and you can get

those. I mean, you can get as cheap as 20 bucks. You can spend up to $500, $500, but it's just important that you're tracking it and you're tracking it every day and taking the average over a week. Because if you're losing weight, I always like to say if you're losing weight but not losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. But if you're losing weight and you're losing muscle, you're creating more metabolic damage. And that is a big challenge with a lot of what's going on right now, especially with the weight loss drugs, is unless you are highly focused on eating protein first and doing the resistance training, you could lose a 25% or more of your muscle mass. Now, unless you have a lot to lose, in which case you've just got, you're going to

lose some. But once you get closer to your goal, 10% should be the least amount of muscle that you're trying to lose. And for most of us, we really need to be putting it on, right? Yeah, zooming out, because I think there's a lot of lessons in the things that you're sharing and just connecting some of the big picture dots is that first and foremost, don't just focus on losing weight. It's really about body composition, which is your core message, right?

What kind of weight do you want to end up losing? You don't want to lose out on muscle, as you mentioned some of the statistics earlier. We talked about that on previous episodes too. And so how do you make sure you lose the right type of weight, but also if you want to preserve your muscle or in some cases add muscle, because that's going to be protective in many things, insulin, you know, how much sugar you can metabolize, just supporting your overall metabolism,

then we need to make sure we have a strategy for that as well. And combined together, would you say that when you do that, not only is it going to be more sustainable, but you're actually going to end up getting to your results much better than what people are traditionally doing, which is starving themselves? Well, you know, I just would love everyone to just kind of think back to this time because I'm sure it's not just me or clients that I've seen frustrated is you cut calories and you get on the scale and first you lose a little weight and then your weight doesn't go down and then maybe it goes up and then you're like frustrated.

Then you go, I failed. And you're using a scale that's going to vary based on body water, based on, you know, transit time of food and you're letting it dictate how you feel about yourself and you get super frustrated. contrast that with, I'm going to focus first on really improving my muscle, turning from a ribby into a fillet, getting stronger, and I know when I do that, and I'll monitor on the scale. Now, it will be a little bit like watching grass grow. We do not put on the fact that my husband put that amount of muscle on in six months is super unusual. Now, there are some tips that will help.

But the reality is, like, we should look at one pound a month. that would be amazing to do, right? So we're kind of watching grass grow doing this, but we'll also see indicators of like, oh my gosh, I was lifting, you know, I was doing a chest press with 20 pound dumbbells, and now I'm doing it with 30 pound dumbbells. That's amazing. It's so inspiring. So we've got to look at the metrics that are the leading indicators, because a lot of times the body composition will be a lagging indicator, right? And so if we are getting stronger, we know what will happen. Now, we still have to make sure the diets dialed in. I was all the way up to getting my PhD and exercise physiologist, exercise phys, but it was back during a time where we didn't even talk about hormones. There was no

exercise endocrinology back then. And I looked at this and I looked at my clients and I went, I have got to pull the nutrition into. Like, when you put these two together, it's a lot of, not one plus one equals two. And especially when you look at building muscle, you can go in the gym and kill yourself all day long, but if you're not eating the right diet, you are not going to get the results that you could. When it comes to weight loss, what percentage would you break down is diet and what percentage is the working out piece, specifically getting the right strain training? So diet can make some initial big shifts and then it will leave you high and dry. right and you know if you look at people who've tried to maintain their weight through diet alone

they are the ones that get skinny fat so the big thing that the diet needs to be there but in order to create long-term sustainable appropriate body composition it's the exercise there's one other piece, though. Like when I look at this and go, we need to totally improve your body composition. If I could only do three things, what would they be? It would be the diet shift. It would be resistance training and a little hit training and sleep. Because all bets are off. We could be eating protein first, getting the right amount of protein in the diet, doing the right amount of carbs and fat for you, doing your resistance training, adding a little hit, and you're not sleeping well, it's not going to work.

It's going to mess you up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, big time. So, okay, so let's just recap those. So diet, you put that first? So to start with, and here's why. Yeah. We need a win, right?

Like, you know, I've worked in this field for 40 years, and it is really hard to tell someone, hey, you know what, we're going to do this. And in six months, you're going to see this. They're like, but I want to go do, I'll just go do Jenny Craig because they say I can lose this in this amount of time. I mean, when I wrote the virgin diet, the tagline was, drop seven foods, lose seven pounds, just seven days, which the reality is you do the virgin diet. All those processed foods are out.

So it's this quick shift that gives people so much of a win that they're in. We know in weight loss that faster weight loss gets people emotionally in the game than they tend to have better results. They're more likely to stick to the diet. They're more likely to feel like I'm committed to this process. Yeah. So personally, I like to start. And I like to do one thing at a time because if you give people too many things, they do nothing.

Yeah. Right? So my first thing is if all you started with was to start tracking. And I will no longer. I work with a couple clients now and we actually are doing this with groups. If you won't track, I will not work with you. Won't do it. I feel like we need to just take a moment to talk about tracking because that and

itself feels so intimidating for people. And yet it's so powerful when you do it initially because you actually go back to this core idea you shared earlier, which is that most of us are underestimating our calories, not to mention underestimating our protein intake by, you know, some high percentage, right? You said 40% on the calories. I don't know what is with protein, but we know that people are underestiming that too. So let's talk about tracking, right? some people feel like it's intimidating. Remind us again why it's so key. And then what is the best way to go about it?

Like what are some of the tips that are there to actually make it part of your life? But for somebody to feel like, oh, my life is not consumed by tracking. Right. And this is not you're going to track for the rest of your life. So that in itself already should give people some ease. Right. And with anything I do, I go, why don't we just do this for a week? Or let's just do this for 21 days.

Can we agree we could do anything for 21 days? days. We've had to track other things, so it's not like this is out of the ballpark. We're just going to start with this. Just let's do it for a week and see. And the research is so clear that people who track are able to maintain their weight better. So, I mean, just that. So for me, with tracking, the first thing I like people to do is just track. Don't make a change. Just track. And let's track for a week and let's see where you average land. How many calories are you average eating a day? How many protein grams are you eating per day in at each meal?

How much fat? How much carbs? How much fiber? That's it. Let's just track. Let's just check it out. And do you have a best app or thing? Obviously now we have so many great technologies.

Back in the day, people used to have used like workbooks and a little calculator. So when I first started this, I made people write this all down. And then finally they were like emailing it to me. texting it to me. I was like, I don't care how you do it. You just must send it to me because I want to make sure you're actually tracking it and measuring it. It's so much easier now. So there's two that I love. I love Lane Norton's Carbon app. And I also love just, this is a free one. It's chronometer. Chronometer. Yeah. It's so easy. It's free. Yeah. And I don't know about chronometer,

but like, can you like scan a barcode? So typically like if you get eggs or this, you can scan it. It learns your stuff. And generally most people are eating, minus eating out, they're generally eating the same meals. You know, they probably have like 13, maybe 20 go-to meals that they're making on a regular basis. So once you get them in, you're just pulling that same meal up or that same food up. It is a pain to start and then it gets very easy. And it also can be a challenge when you're eating out. But it's so mission critical because now of a sudden you are actually asking the

questions that I always teach people to ask that they don't ask. You're really looking what you're ordering. How much protein is in that dish, right? So you can do it and it will change your behavior so quickly. So that's why just like week one, you don't have to change anything. All you need to do is track. Just by tracking, guess what will happen? You will start to change your behavior like, oh my gosh, because it also will make you think if you are going to grab that extra keto cookie. because it all counts. Too much healthy foods unhealthy, and I'd argue with a lot of the stuff out there. It's amazing after the virgin diet, you know, I had to field so many questions of all this gluten-free junk food. And then keto had a resurgence, and now there's all this keto junk food.

You know, it's like, for the most part, the closer we can get to nature, we're going to be better off. So the first thing you do is start with tracking. And I had a great nutrition mentor early on. said, we need to add before we take away. And so the second thing that you do is that you ensure that you are getting optimal protein. Women especially are nowhere close to where they need to be. Now, a lot of that is because our RDA is really just ridiculous. And I know that there is a push to get a change, but you know that'll probably happen in 30, 40 years after so many people have died of frailty. So what I use is I created a protein calculator and it's basically 0.7 grams to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. I was doing it based on lean body mass and I went,

you know, I'm just setting up a problem here for people. So we'll just do it this way. I'd rather people err on the higher side than the lower side. And then I really focus on bumper meals because the first morning, the first meal of the day, that's when you are stopping that muscle protein breakdown. You've got to start to trigger muscle protein synthesis. So 30 grams is sort of the low end. I get 50 grams every morning. That's my focal point is to get that. And I try. I, travel with stuff just in case we're stuck, you know. So take that math, that formula that you had for target protein. And if you don't mind, use somebody's fictitious weight or your weight or just walk us

through that example of what you're shooting for on a regular basis. And obviously, you have your hacks and we'll get back to that 30 to 50. You know, you have 50. You recommend 30. But walk us through that. What is somebody shooting for? Well, just like a 120-pound woman. So here's the thing that we know is as you age, you need more, not less.

Right? We have anabolic resistance. We're not able to do muscle protein synthesis as well as we used to. If you're vegan or vegetarian, you likely need more, not less because you don't have the essential amino acids and protein digestibility that you would if you ate animal protein. So, and as we age, we have lower stomach acid. Likely, you need protein digestive enzymes too. So the reality is, and if you're not working out, you need more, not less, which is such a counterintuitive thing. You'd think, oh, I'm working out. I'll need more. But you actually need less because you've got just some of the triggers for building muscle from just the resistance training. But I would rather err on the high side of one gram per pound of target body weight. If you're under a lot of stress or having surgery, I'd go up from that. Like when my son had surgery, I had them on two to three grams per target body weight, obviously using a lot of supplementation. So 120 pound woman, that would be with 30 grams minimum at a meal with the to the beginning and ending meal most important. That's really 40 grams at each meal, but she could go higher.

She could go 50 at the morning and evening and a little lower at lunch. The evening's important too because overnight you're going to go into muscle protein breakdown again. So let's like reduce that as much as possible. Yeah. So just to tease out a few things that are there. So number one, for your clients that you've worked with and obviously written books and sold a bazillion copies and have different programs.

that people have gone through. When people start, and it comes to the topic of protein, I have the experience of having kind of shared that with my sisters and podcasts guests that have come on and talked about the power of protein, just like you. A lot of women feel like, whoa, I'm not eating anywhere near to that amount. What do you find for your average woman that's out there? Let's maybe go a little bit higher in weight. You know, 120 might be a little bit lower than the average weight of a lot of the women

that might be out there that are 40 plus. Let's say somebody's like 160, 150, right? And they are trying to eat healthy and they feel like they're shopping at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and other things like that, but they've never tracked before. So they don't know where their calories are coming from. If their target body weight is, let's say, 130, right? Or even 140, they want to drop 10 pounds, right? Depending on their height and everything like that.

What are you often finding is actually the amount of protein that they're eating? If the goal is, let's say, 130, because you're, asking them to eat a gram per target weight that's there, right? What do you often find as the spectrum of what people are eating if they're not tracking this? Well, they're not paying attention to it. They're nowhere close. Now, fortunately, I've- Half maybe? Yeah, probably about half. Like, in my world, I have for over a decade taught people to start, break their fast with a loaded protein smoothie. And done correctly, that loaded protein smoothie minimally would have 30 grams of protein, but can have as much as 50 grams of protein. You can just spike that thing, right? You can use,

I love good karma flax milk because it's got some extra pea protein in it. You can add some extra collagen, not a complete protein, but still it will give you some protein grams. You can use your protein powder. So it is pretty easy to get it in that way. But for the average person who might be having their little like muffin for breakfast. Avocado toast. They're avocado toast and they have a poach day and that poach day gave them six grams of protein. Right.

And then let's say avocado has a little bit of protein but not much. I mean maybe they got 10 grams from all of that. Yeah. But let's be honest, the avocado and the toast, that's not high quality protein. Right. You're not getting all of your essential meat. You're not going to take that to the bank. Yeah.

You're not going to get that loosening level you need to trigger muscle protein synthesis. So that's why I say the first step is track. Then the second step is let's just focus on protein. And here's what's cool. It's what's bizarro is the food guide pyramid that became the MyPlate was like a science experiment. No people group in history had ever eaten the way that the food guide pyramid had put together. And in fact, it is so abysogenic. It's ridiculous.

Like if you look at what makes people gain fat, it's a low protein high carb, high diet. Like the single thing we know is don't eat high carb, high fat. And that's what that pyramid was, right? And we know, too, that if all you did was increased protein to even 20%, 18%, but let's say you took it to 20 to 25%. First, you have the thermic effect of food. And when you look at our metabolism, we have our resting metabolic rate. We have what we do throughout the day, the neat that we all need to be doing more. of, you know, we should be standing up right now. So standing rather than sitting, walking farther

away from the car, like park it far away instead of trying to find the closest spot. All that stuff counts, fidgeting, et cetera. And that accounts for a lot more than exercise. Exercise is like 5%. Everyone's like, I did the exercise and I got my calorie burn on the treadmill. I'm like, it didn't subtract out your resting metabolic rate. That's not really your calorie burn. And so you have exercise, you have basal metabolic rate, you have your neat. And then you have the thermic effect of food. Now, fat's nothing. Carbohydrates like 10 to 15%, protein 20 to 30%, because it has to go through and do the muscle

protein turnover. So think about if all you did was push up your protein, which is going to be more satiating, it's going to have better blood sugar control, and it's going to have the thermic effect, you're going to crowd out the other stuff. That's why the whole thing, my mantra, is eat, protein first. Get your plate, flip it around, don't eat that baked potato yet, start with the steak, start with the wild salmon, eat all of that first. Get the protein first. Yeah, because then you know you got it, but also, you're going to get full. Have you heard of that protein leverage hypothesis?

No, talk about it. Oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing these bug researchers discovered. And what they discovered with bugs and then with animals and then like I discovered this just going to a vegan restaurant. So I'm sure you'll relate to this being a recovering vegetarian is that when you sit down to eat and it's a low protein meal, you will overeat in order to get enough protein in. And once you hear that, because I, you know, I had a girlfriend in L.A. who was like a total vegan. So I'd always go to this high-end gourmet vegan restaurant. And I was like, I felt like I needed to put like a roast in my purse. So I was like, I was always hungry. I was like, I just ate so much food at this restaurant and I'm still not satisfied.

And that is that protein leverage hypothesis. So what would happen if we flipped that script and we just said, eat protein first? Make sure you get that in. Know how much you need. So, you know, this morning we were at a hotel. Tim, Tim just discovered he was egg, dairy, and gluten intolerant. I actually had to test him. I was like, just do the virgin diet.

But I actually test him. And the funny thing is we were on a cruise when he got the results. He's like, I'm not on the cruise. Nothing counts. I'm like, right, dude. Anyway, so he ate the steak of steak and eggs. I took his eggs and a bunch of egg whites so I could get enough protein grams in, right, and a little bit of bacon and counted it up.

Use my app to make sure I was where I needed to be. So this is all doable. But again, you have to teach yourself. so you know what it is. Yeah, and anything you do new for the first time, it's going to be tough. People learn driving for the first time. It's tough.

You feel like you have to pay attention to all these knobs, all these things, especially if it's a manual. So there is going to be a little bit of learning curve, but the question is always, you know, it's not, is this hard? It's, is this worth it? And when I think about it, there's so many people. And unfortunately, I feel like women are a huge percentage of this because so much of our media culture targets and praise upon women, the magazines that are out there,

they used to be on one extreme, now they're on a different extreme. Maybe we'll talk about that in a second. But there's so much that praise upon women and the societal standards. And yes, we want to be healthy, but there's a lot of people that want to sell to women. And so they end up going on these up and down constant roller coasters that just stress them out. It drives me nuts. I like literally the message I have is the message I've been talking about for 40 years. And it just breaks my heart to see what is being sold to women. And honestly, it's because

we are the health care CEOs as a family, right? Sure. Like, we're the ones reading the diet books. We're the ones listening to the health podcast for the most part. And then we're bringing it home and taking it to our spouse, our partner, et cetera. And I'm really pushing this message out now, but it really needs to start when we are in our teens. I was fortunate to be a massive athlete in my teens, you know, working out with the football team because we had no gyms back then. The gyms were like for the football guys, right?

But when I used to take women to Gold's Gym in Venice, and I did this as a field trip back when I was a trainer, they were so afraid of getting big. Right. So afraid of getting big. My grandmother used to tell that to my sister, like, don't work out, you're going to get big. And meanwhile, I'm over here, I'm like,

what is that going to happen to me? Like, how easy is it to get big? It's actually really difficult to get big. So I've trained, I don't know how many people over the years, I've never once seen a woman without steroids get big. Never. Never once. Not possible. And in fact, Miriam Nelson from Tufts wrote this book, I think it was like strong women don't get fat or something like that. And what she showed is women put muscle on, they got smaller. Not bigger. It's your metabolic spanks. It holds everything in tighter. And this is where you're going to burn your fat. This is how you're going to improve your metabolism. And so that little Pilates class, it's a great adjunct, but it's not going to cut it. You are not going to build muscle in Pilates or yoga. You have to do

things that literally you get to a point of close to failure. And no, you're not going to get big doing that. And you know what's the coolest thing is if in the wildest chance you did, you'd stop and back it off. Right. So it's not like overnight you wake up and you go, I'm Popeye. No, that, you know, this is never happening. If it was that easy, all these men would be out there ripped, right? But they're not. It's actually really difficult. And we are very similar. Like everyone thinks, oh, it's much different, you know, training women. It really isn't. It's not. It's not that different. Like, we basically can build muscle the same. So not a big difference here. So it is hard for us to get big in our wildest dreams. So that's what it's like, women lift heavy in good form.

And that's why I always say, how much should I lift? I go, get your form, get your technique dialed. That's the most important thing. And then lift as much as you possibly can in good form. And when you think you can't lift another one, do that because you can. So where we are, we were talking about diet and that being the biggest thing because you get some quick wins. Yes. And you also understand your baseline. And just by tracking your baseline, you're in a place where you're naturally going to start

making better decisions. To do that, it's better and it's going to be easier and more sustainable if you use some sort of app. And we'll list some of the ones you mentioned inside of the show. You have to use an app. Like 20 years ago, I was like, write it on a journal page, you know. No, use an app. It's so easy. It learns for you. It will blow your mind. It's the single most effective thing for improving your diet is just tracking. It's simple. And again, track first.

Track first. Just one week. Just check things out. Be curious. Go, what am I really doing? And what are you looking at? You're going to look at overall calories for the day. So you get a sense of what does your body need? Because we naturally will do a maintenance thing. We eat a little more one day. We eat a little less the next day, just kind of see where your average is, right? Next, as you're tracking that, you're going to look, how many proteins and grams am I eating per meal and overall? How much fat am I eating? Where's that fat coming from? Right? Is that coming from omega-6s? Is omega-3? It's like, where's the fat coming from. It's great if you go that granular, but you don't have to. The one I really want to see is carbs and fiber, because there's a big difference between having 130 grams of

carbs and no fiber versus 130 grams of carbs and 30 to 50 grams of fiber. So fiber should be a macronutrient. Yeah. What's your target? What do you want people to hit for? Obviously, it might take them time if they're not eating a lot. I think the average American is getting less than 15 grams of fiber a day or like 10 grams of fiber a day. Yeah, I think that it's somewhere in there. And I've learned my lesson. Unfortunately, I learned my lesson with my dad when I upped his fiber too fast. Oops. So you increase your fiber over time, not overnight. with water. And the other one that you've got to track is hydration. Because if you're dehydrated, you actually will store fat, not burn it, which is a crazy thing. And it takes minimal amount

of dehydration, like 1% to start to raise stress hormones. Your body actually takes glycogen from your liver, freeze it, turns it into fructose, and stores it as fat so that you, like the camel, can make it out into the desert and be able to break down that fat and get water. Yeah, yeah. People see camels and they're in the desert. Don't be a camel. It's the fat that's in the hump that allows them to live for a long time without actually drinking water. No different than like bears putting on fat before they go into hibernation.

We've had Dr. Richard Johnson on the podcast. I love him so much. I totally did an embarrassing fan girl over him. Oh, yeah? What did you do? Well, just because he's so, I think he is just a treasure. And just that information on fructose, when I was writing the sugar impact diet, he was my, like, man. Yeah.

Like, it's such great information because in the sugar impact diet, I go, we've been looking at this all wrong. Yeah. Like, but there tends to be either it's all fructose or it's all sugar or it's all carbs. I'm like, what if we just looked at all of this and went, you know, fructose, insulin and glycemic index versus fiber and nutrients and not make it to either make carb deville and fructose villain. Yeah, I think we're getting out of villainization. We're realizing that you can have a broader diet and it's all about how to make it fit in a way that people can follow it and that they only have to focus on a few core things. And then great, if they want to go crazy every so often, that's fine. But that's a lot easier to do when you have that baseline and that consistency that's

there. Well, and the good news is, so when you're eating protein first, okay, so there's a cake coming out for dessert, you'll have a little bit of it, but you probably will be too full to do much more. And you can, life involves cake. Right. You know, people always go, what do I do about my birthday? Go, have cake. If you like cake or pie, what it just, that's, your birthday is not the issue. It's not, in order to have a sustainable plan, you're going to have these things that come up. They're fine. You just learn how to deal with them. But in the tracking, again, the next thing you just look at is protein and making sure you're getting enough. After that, the next thing I look at is getting in five to ten servings of non-searchy vegetables a day.

Yeah, which are examples. It's all the stuff that you probably aren't eating. You know, you look at vegetables, and apparently if we took out French fries and ketchup, Americans would eat no vegetables. Yeah. And I probably add in little iceberg lettuce, yeah. And corn is not a vegetable. Right.

Corn's a grain. So it is the broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, onions, mushrooms. Mushrooms. I'm like an obsessed person with mushrooms, had them this morning in my eggs. So it's all of the non-star cheese and it is really getting that diversity. I don't know if you've had Deanna Minic on. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm like big Deanna fan and getting that diversity. I mean, she talks about 50 different ones a week. And I'm like, 50. She goes, spices count. I'm like, okay, there's a chance here. But just, you know, we get into such food ruts. And this is where literally frozen vegetables can save the day and frozen fruit. because frozen vegetables peaked at the height of harvest.

And frozen, you can have your cauliflower rice, broccoli rice, all sorts of different things that maybe you wouldn't get, mushrooms, et cetera. So we really work on getting in a diversity of different vegetables and salads. And so five is my baseline, and that's a half a cup cooked or a cup raw, and really tends the goal. So protein. And with protein, generally comes some healthy fats. That's why it's really important that you are what you eat ate, right? Because that will change both the amino acid and the fatty acid profile. But if you're eating grass-fed finished beef, you're eating wild fish, you're getting good omega-3s, some CLA from the beef there.

So you count some fat in with the protein. Then you do your non-starchies, likely use some extra virgin olive oil there or something. Count that fat in. Then you add in two fruits a day. And those mean, like, again, big diversity. but I loved berries. And then after that is your decision with fat and carbs. But I find quite often when you do that much and you've used some fat in the

preps on the other things like some ghee or some extra virgin olive oil, you're pretty close to done. Yeah. Right? It's like they're so satiating that you don't really even feel like you have a lot of room. When people start to track and they prioritize protein and they're getting in those vegetables, they're getting in that fiber, those non-starchy vegetables, they start to generally just feel more full. Right.

Versus being on the high carb, high fat, which you end up in particular about the carbs, you're on this blood sugar roller roller coaster. And even if you're sticking at your calories, the sort of snack well or the weight watchers approach from back in the day, which is eat anything, it's just, I think weight watchers change it a little bit later on. But it was back then. It was just, you know, count the points. Count the points, what it is. Well, those foods are going to generally make you crave other foods and your blood sugar. We've done a bunch of episodes on that topic. It's going to drive you nuts and you're not going to have focus.

You're going to feel crazy. And you're going to constantly feel like you have to keep a bunch of carbohydrates and snacks and skittles and other stuff in your pocket or extra caffeine just to make it through the day. So early on, when I was first in graduate school, I was training clients at the Pritiken Center in the Pacific Palisades. The Pridican Center was vegetarian, although they did fish twice a week at two meals, people would come live there and it was 10% calories from fat. It was a very high carbohydrate diet, low protein, probably 10% from protein, high carb. Now, I'm one of those people that goes all in with something and I'm like, I will try this. I was literally living on bagels, fat-free cream cheese, you know, pasta, potatoes and skim milk lattes and I had to eat every one to two hours and I was literally hypoglycemic.

And I remember I was in back, I did a body composition test. We were doing this at USC when I was at their PhD program. We did all the different, we were calibrating all the different body composition tests. And I came out at 25%. Wow. Now, 25% for me is just like I never sit there. And I was just, I was doing loads of cardio and eating, because that was Pritiken, loads of cardio, super, super, low fat, low protein. And I went, nope, you know, because I just was like, let's test it and see. I was like, wow, did that damage my metabolism? Wow.

Quickly. I want to take a pause from this sort of stack that you've been building up, which has been fantastic. There's so many practical tips that you've been outlining, and I know we still have some more to get to. I want to go to the topic of OZempic, right? And I want your thoughts on it because I'm seeing more and more telemedicine emerge, these sort of startups emerge.

And a lot of people who feel like they've been struggling with weight for so long that they are seeing their friends that are out there. And they're losing, especially where I live over here, where you used to live. I'm in Los Angeles and Brentwood and the Palisades in Santa Monica. and there's a lot of individuals that are on this. I was at a fundraiser this weekend, and you could tell that there was probably a lot of people that were on those MVIC that were there.

Talk up a little bit about this. I'm sure you've been following it very closely. And what are your thoughts on the situation? My answer is probably not what you think it is. No, I actually have a feeling that you're going to give a more nuanced answer, which is why I asked you. So when I was on the Dr. Phil show,

he had a chapter in his book called Weight Loss Resistance. And I thought that is such an interesting thing. And this was what 20 plus years ago. No, it was 2007. And I thought, weight loss resistance. What could get in the way of you losing weight and cause you to gain weight? And I started digging in, you know, past looking at diet and exercise, what else is there? Well, there's thyroid. There's insulin resistance. There's toxicity. At the time, we didn't know that there was all this gut microbiome stuff and food sensitivity stuff. That's how that whole book came out of that. And genetics, obviously. And so I got all of these different factors. And I was teaching a course to doctors all around the country, really working on this. And, you know, working with people who are weight loss resistant for whatever reason. And there's so many different things, sleep, stress, right? And so when this OZembek came out, people need a little win, right and this drug there's also if you start to dig into this drug I went to I was at integrative health care symposium where I actually did this cool thing with Mark this year and they

had a guy talk about this and he started talking about the other effects beyond weight loss and the neuroregeneration and heart and kidney I put my son Grant on this so my son Grant now is cycling it for the neuro regeneration so I've been looking at this and I'm actually working with with my doctor friends in Tampa and we put together a program. My next book actually is the perfect program for Ozembic, for Mungaro, for any of these things. Here's the problem with the drugs. As I started to do the research, they are getting the drug and they aren't getting what should, the only way you should be able to get this drug is if you absolutely must track your food, eat protein first, get in your protein amounts and do resistance training. And if you will not do

that, you cannot have the drug. And the other thing that has to happen is that you have to monitor your fat-free mass and make sure that you are maintaining your skeletal muscle mass. Now, like 10% would be the least amount, the most that you could possibly lose of skeletal muscle, that you are losing from fat. The scary thing with this is that if you look at the diets online for this, they are basically low calorie, low fat, low protein diets. They eat little amounts. It's almost like a bariatric surgery diet. They're giving them really nothing, and they're not recommending resistance training.

And now we're seeing this devastating impact to the metabolism. People are saying they can never go off it. Well, true. If you devastate your metabolism, because you have to heal your metabolism to be able to lose fat, and have a great, you know, great metabolic rate, if you are devastating it by losing muscle, you have a major problem. So while these drugs could be the best thing ever because we have now 80% overweight and obese. Yeah, we're not going to just fix it by teaching everybody how to cook, even though it's a beautiful dream.

We haven't fixed it yet. More information than ever out there, and we haven't fixed it yet. Now, for a lot of reasons, we've gone after the wrong targets. Like, just the description of diets alone and the way we put people on a diet where it's this, you know, we're lowering calories and we're giving them this ultra-processed food that makes them hungry is just mean and it doesn't work. It's ineffective. So if you could give them something that's going to now all of a sudden improve insulin, improve their satiety and give them a little, take the edge off a little bit, while you're making them track, increase their protein, add resistance training could be amazing. But it's not being done that way.

And that's the big challenge. What about any kind of concerns that are bubbling up about any kind of long-term health damage? But again, the long-term health damage. I mean, these drugs have been around for a decade for diabetes. The long-term health damage, what's the big health damage for long-term obesity? Yeah, it's huge. You know? Most people are getting all these chronic diseases because they're diabetic, they're obese.

So you're just saying we have to weigh the pros and cons. So you look, yeah, risk reward on everything in life. The risk here is really about your muscle mass. Yeah. It could easily not be an issue. I'm literally building the program. We're doing the trial group right now on this to prove that you can do this and not lose muscle. Right.

So we don't need to demonize it. We do need some tools to tackle this sort of obesity epidemic. But it can't be this idea that you just take a medication and it's a free lunch because you're going to end up second. sacrificing all these other things. And we have a whole sort of maybe decade of a lot of women and some men too. They're going to be extremely frail, not strong, not to mention potentially they'll be skinny, but they'll be diabetic. Right. Right? Because they're eating a lot of foods that are, you know, not supporting their overall body, maybe extra carbs, extra other things, even if their calories are lower. So it's like any other type of weight loss diet. I mean, we could go back to the biggest loser and go look at the metabolic adaptation that happened there and they were exercising like fiends and still exercising. It's going to be the same devastating metabolic adaptation effect. That's why how would you use this correctly? You're frustrated. You haven't been able to lose weight. Your thyroid's working well. I always say, is your thyroid really working well? And I'm sure you've had a lot of thyroid experts on here. Your thyroid really has to be working well. Your

well. You've managed your stress. You've, you still are a little insulin resistant, so that's probably one of the big issues. You're doing your exercise, you're eating, but you just need something to help you get started. And you are committed to make sure you're, you're going to eat your protein first, and you're going to eat the amounts that are right for your target body weight. You are committed to doing resistance training three days a week, walking after meals. We all need to move so much more than we're moving. Holy smokes. You know, doing a little hit training for that visceral out of post tissue you're going to do all of that stuff but you're going to use this as a little helper i think that it makes we have got a crisis we've got to do something

now and when i was on dr phil we did we tried to take on the teens because it was like if you're an overweight teen the chance you'll be an overweight adult is like 70 percent but the challenge was the parents so we were like chicken egg what do we do here Like, we would help the teens, but the parents would sabotage the teens. We'd help the parents. And then, you know, it's like, so I think that this done correctly is a huge opportunity. The other opportunity that's great with all of this is that we can talk about weight loss again because we couldn't talk about it for a while.

And, you know, I know this is unpopular what I'm about to say. It may not be with our audience, but jump into it. All right, but I'm going to go there. It is absolutely inappropriate to take. tell people they can be healthy at any size. You should love yourself at any size. And then you should love yourself enough to say, I want to be my healthiest best self, whatever that is for me. And, you know, we cannot tell someone if you're 100 pounds overweight that you can be healthy because that's a lie. It's a flat out lie. And it's doing them a massive disservice.

Yeah. Where do you think that all that came from? Just like big picture. You know, you've been in this industry for a long time. You've seen all the different trends and the ups and downs, right? Was that a reaction to, you know, not to demonize anybody, but like Vogue and these different magazines putting the super skinny models on there and sort of a lot of that that was going on in the 90s and the early 2000s, that that's the vision of beauty. That started in the 60s with Twiggy. Like that's been going on forever.

I was born 82. So, you know, I have my own reference range. That was in, I mean, you know, I wasn't around then either, but it was Twiggy. in the 60s, I think, really started a lot of that, and they've been using these crazy skinny models ever since. In fact, I've had this bizarro career. Part of my career I was living in Fort Lauderdale, and I would go to South Beach, and I did nutrition for the models down there. And they did not want to put any muscle. They needed to be super skinny. And I look at them now, and I go, these are women who devastated their metabolisms, right? If you look at what happened, especially over the pandemic,

I remember hearing a statistic that by the year 2030 that we were going to be 100% diabetic. And I go, that is ridiculous. And then you look at what happened over the pandemic and how we went into the pandemic. 12% of the population was metabolically healthy came out of it, 6.8%. And the obesity statistics that have been on the rise since the 80s that are now the overweight and obesity is what nearly 80%. And I think we had to make being over. fat, not overweight, over fat okay because it was just, it's more normal than being. It's more normal than ever.

It's more, well, if you look out around, I mean, go anywhere, go to Disneyland, go to mall, go whatever. The thin people are the not normals. Right. Right? The normal weight person's the not normal. So we just made it okay. But that's not helping anyone.

Sure. Maybe also a little bit of like the politically correct language. Yeah. Great safe spaces for everybody. Well, let's do that. Like, let's not demonize someone because they're struggling with their weight. I can pretty much guarantee you since I've worked in this field for 40 years that no one is sitting there going, you know, I feel great about being over fat.

What I really want to communicate is feel good about yourself. You're doing everything you can. They're frustrated. What I learned over the years working with so many people who are over fat is that they knew more about it. They were trying harder. It's on their mind all the time. All the time.

If you have a friend or a family member or somebody that's close to you, or maybe that's even that person is you. I never dealt with that myself. I was always a skinny Indian vegetarian kid. So I had my own challenge. Yeah. But it is literally on your mind all the time. Anytime you get dressed in the morning,

anytime you go in the mirror, anytime you walk into a room, people constantly have that narrative of, are people looking at me? Are they going to like me? Do they think I'm too fat? You know, that's just a constant thing.

So they don't want to be that way, right? and they haven't been given the right tools and information, kind of been lied to a little bit by the narrative that's been up there. Kind of been lied to? Like, you look at what we've done over the last 30 years telling people to eat. No, you just need to, no, you need to cut the fat out. All you need to do is go fat free. No, you need to eat pretty much only fat.

No, like you look at it and go, should I be fat-free? Love it, if you look at all of the traditional diets out there, it's carbs are fat, carbs are fat, carbs are fat. and they missed the most important one and just go, well, what if you just focused on your protein? And then it was like extra to do loads and loads and loads and loads of cardio. We've devastated people. That can make you lose your muscle and raise stress hormones and make you hungrier for carbs. We know that when you do chronic endurance training.

Burns up muscle, raises stress hormones, makes you hungrier. And then you're not supposed to eat because you're on a diet. Like it's just a horrible situation that we've done over the years. Another topic that I want to get your thoughts on, and I'm sure you have a lot of nuanced thoughts about this, which is why I want to ask you, right? That's what our audience wants to hear. Fasting, intermittent fasting, right? That's a big tool. It's almost like the wellness industry's version of like an Ozempic sometimes that people are like, hey, I have this wedding coming up or this situation or I want to lose 10 pounds.

What's the best way? They'll see a lot of things that are out there that fasting is going to be one of the best vehicles for them. What are your thoughts, especially in this category of women 40 plus that we're having a dialogue around? This is all part of this weight loss series that we're doing and healthy body composition. What are your thoughts on fasting? So you said something that's so important. You said a tool.

D diets are tools. What I've discovered over the years because all my friends write diet books, right? And first of all, quite often we write the book for ourselves. And then we think everybody should do that one. Hey, this work for me. Everybody should do this thing. Dites are tools. You need to figure out what is your big issue that you need help with right now.

What's the best tool for that? If you've got inflammation, if you've got gut problems, I think the virgin diet could help you a bunch. If you can't get over your sugar cravings, sugar impact diet, if you need to quickly help your blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, intermittent fasting and fasting are a great tool. I love that you had Sachin Panda on recently. I think he is just, his work is so amazing. And so I think the very first part of this is intermittent fasting where you're eating within a 12-hour window is normal eating. That shouldn't be considered fasting.

When I was growing up, you ate dinner. You didn't eat after dinner. There was no fourth meal. Thank you, Taco Bell, for starting that one. you ate dinner and the kitchen was closed. You went to bed three hours later. You got up in the morning about an hour or two after being up. You ate breakfast.

You had lunch. Maybe you had a snack. That was it. Then all of a sudden we went into this like, let's pull all the fat out. And all of a sudden we were supposed to graze. And we have breakfast in a snack and lunch and a snack and dinner in a snack. Because God forbid that somewhere in the middle of the night, you like got hungry. Right?

And so the very first thing is 12 hours is like the most you should be eating in and you should be eating three, four times. Maybe two, but I think really for what you need in terms of protein, et cetera, three to four. Now, I think we're better off shortening that a little bit, you know, eight to ten hours. And I find for most people, if you get up in the morning, give yourself time to wake up, right? Cortisol is coming up. Insulin's going to start to get woken up again. your pancreas is kind of going to sleep and bringing pancreatic insulin down at night. So then eat.

So get up in the morning, do your meditation, et cetera, have breakfast, you know, hour and a half, two hours later. And then eat every three to five hours because if you ate from the trifecta of getting eating protein first, adding in some non-surchy vegetables, adding in a little bit of fruit or a slow little carb and some healthy fats, you've got good blood sugar stability. You shouldn't be hungry every hour, right? If you are hungry every hour, is that one of the things? the earliest indications that you're eating window or the foods you're eating is problematic

and you got to shift things. Yeah. So first, I would always look at your meal. That's the greatest thing tracking going, did I get enough protein? Did I get some healthy fats? Did I get my non-sarty vegetables and fiber? I always go fiber from non-surchy vegetables or fruit, slow low carbs. Did I do that?

If I did that and something's still off, okay, now what's going on, right? Am I starting to get insulin resistant? did I do a huge workout? Am I highly stressed? What's going on? So that's the first step is that's normal eating. We got so far away from it that we had to create a term to get back to normal. Then let's look at compressing that feeding window and the atophagy piece. Well, first of all, the atophagy piece, you know, getting rid of the damaged cells. Exercise is great for autophagy. We act like the only way to trigger autophagy is to do this fasting. No, that's one way. Exercise is a great way. So there are other ways you can do this, not just fasting.

But fasting is so great for quickly restoring blood sugar stability, for insulin sensitivity. So if someone's really battling that, I think it can be amazing. Where it's not amazing is a 40-plus-year-old woman who's basically dieted her whole life. She's really damaged her muscle mass. And now she's going to do this and she's going to eat omad, you know, one meal a day, day or she's going to eat two meals within her feeding window. No way she's going to get enough protein during that time. And that's a problem. Now, could she use it as a tool once or twice a week? Sure, that's a great thing. So maybe you do a nine hour window five days a week and then you say,

I'm going to do weekends, it's easier for me. I'm going to compress it down and trigger some autophagy and do a five-hour eating window. Totally do that. But a daily thing, I do not agree with the daily thing for the 40-plus-year-old woman, unless they've got way more muscle mass than they ever wanted to have, and they're hugely insulin resistant. And those two things don't go together. So they would be the weird unicorn out there. Yeah. This goes back to a larger idea, which you're really talking about focusing on the basics. Even in your example with OZempic, right? You were like, okay, can it be a tool? Awesome, but how do you do it right? Fasting. Can it be a tool, but how do you do it right. And doing it right comes back to your core message that you were sharing earlier, right?

Are you getting the right amount of protein? Are you tracking in some degree? Doesn't mean you track forever, but you have a general sense of how many calories you're consuming overall, even if you eat clean. Right. And where they come from. And where they come from, right, eating too much of this, too little of that, et cetera. And then also, especially front loading a lot of that protein in the beginning of the day to increase that satiety and to have you be less hungry throughout there. And I, think that one thing is important and it's good to see the wellness industry shift over a time is that with the focus on these basics like functional medicine is so amazing integrative medicine is so amazing and sometimes it's convinced people that oh it's this mercury thing yeah it's this

thing over here you've got mold or mold that is the reason that you are overweight not that those things can't play a role right especially when somebody somebody's had progress and then they kind of get sort of bottom out, right? Yeah. But if you're not looking at the basics, more likely it's the basics and not some crazy thing out there that you haven't discovered yet in some obscure test. Would you agree with that? So when I started working in the whole weight loss resistance realm, I became obsessed with it, identified all of these different things, the first step so that I could understand the degree of your weight loss resistance was let's get the basics correct. So the basics were, of course the diet we discussed already, starting to do resistance training hard and some hit

training and sleep and walking after meals, getting that sleep dialed in and looking at your stress. Remind me tell you funny stress story. Then we could start to look at those other things. If those things aren't together, again, just repeat them one more time because I think they're so essential for people. So with diet, track, eat protein first, optimize your protein intake, and then add the non-sarty vegetables, add the fruit. And I have a trifecta. I call it eat by the plate, which is protein. And again, eating protein first.

Then your healthy fats and your fiber from your non-sarty vegetables, fruit, and a small amount of slow, low carbs. The more fat, the less carbs. The more carbs, the less fat. Do not eat high-carb, high-fat. That is the obesogenic formula, right? And depending on your carbs really, you have to earn your carbs, right? So beyond the vegetables and the fruit, what else you need really depends on your activity level.

And I find people who are under more stress, they do better with more carbs, people who are more insulin resistant, more blood sugar stuff, do better with less carbs. So it's just, you know, again, what's the best tool for you? There's no specific macro formula that's right for everybody. Or right for you now might be different for you later. So that's where tracking can really help you identify. Where do I feel the best? Because you are really your best nutritionist.

Just tightening up and sort of putting a little bow tie on the morning conversation. So we know protein. What does that look like for you in the morning? Like if you just give a few examples of how you hit that 50 grams of protein, what does that look like for you? Yeah. So I'm a big smoothie person. I have been for years because it's so easy. And so or I will do a nut base.

Sadly, I wish. that I could do dairy because weight protein and Greek style yogurt can be so amazing. However, when I was doing the whole weight loss resistance thing with the docs, one of the things I did was use a food sensitivity test. And so I had the opportunity to work with them in their offices and look at hundreds of these tests and then work with the lab director because who'd seen thousands and thousands of them. And the food sensitivity test, it's a tough one, looks at a delayed reaction to food due to gut permeability, leaky gut. Back when I first started talking about this, no one knew what leaky gut or food intolerance was, but we've had this test around as a

tool for years. What I discovered in looking at these tests were that the majority of the people who took the test, I rarely ever saw someone with nothing. 90% of people, dairy and eggs. next tier was soy corn and peanuts. Gluten wasn't on that test, but gluten, as we know, creates leaky gut, makes your gut more permeable. And so the challenge I see in this would, and I actually just did a trial again because I've always been dairy intolerant. I thought, I'll try it again. I'll see. And in order to make that test work correctly, you have to eat it.

And so I did Greek style yogurt and weigh protein for a couple months and then bam, dairy intolerant again. And what did that show up as for you? Was that bloating? It was, yeah, little bloating, skin issues, but it's inflammation. It will trigger low-grade inflammation. A lot of times people won't even be aware of it. They'll go, oh, and that's just normal for me. I get headaches, normal for me. I get gas and bloating. Normal for me. No, that's not normal. That's your body going, hey, this is not working for you. And so Virgin Diet pulls that stuff out and then as you go back and challenge it so you can see the response because basically unmasks the food intolerance. You can also do a food sensitivity test. And so I did that. And I was bummed because Greek-style yogurt is a great easy one. And so for a while, I was doing Greek-style yogurt, stirring in my protein powder extra collagen. And I was like, winner. Then I got the test. I was like, darn it. So, yeah, for me, it's, I always had issues with dairy growing up. I didn't know it. And then I developed really bad acne that I went off of dairy. This was like when I was like 18, 19,

primarily because I decided to become vegan. And my acne went completely away. And so do your muscles. I didn't even really have any muscles because I grew up vegetarian. Yeah, vegetarians are at the highest risk for this because they basically eat eggs and dairy and soy. And those are three of the most common food intolerances. So if you aren't dairy intolerant, then those are great options for me.

I am and I find for so many of my people they are. So it's so easy to do a smoothie. Sometimes I'll do like an almond milk Greek-style yogurt. I like the Kite Hill one. I'll stir in some collagen and protein powder into that. Or I'll do like I love the good karma flax milk and the collagen and the protein powder. And I throw it all in a smoothie. And I use a little bit of green banana.

Like it's just where you can peel it. I freeze that. I throw half a green banana and I throw in some chiar flax in there. And you feel full. Oh, totally full. And then when's the next time that you end up eating for yourself? I usually do breakfast around. We get up at six and meditate. I usually do breakfast around 8, 8.30. We'll go to the gym about an hour after that. So the smoothie is kind of like pretty

much right away. About two hours after waking up. Two hours after waking up. Yeah, get up, meditate. We got a cold plunge. I talk myself into it. Tell myself wanting to do it for a minute. Stay in for four. And then I'll do lunch usually around 12. of one. What is the worst way? Not that we're demonizing anything, but if somebody's consistently starting their morning off like this, that's the opposite of what you're talking about. Oh my gosh. Right. What's the worst way? A skinny latte and a muffin. A muffin. Do you know those muffins from Starbucks? I was doing a, you know, how to start your day off right. And I discovered that the sugar intake, the sugar in like the healthy morning muffin at Starbucks was the same amount of sugar as two

hostess cupcakes. Wow. Right. And someone's going into Starbucks and they're seeing it and it looks like it's healthy and it's got, you know, they're like, oh, I'll be good. I'll have the skinny latte, which is skim milk, so it's all sugar. And I'll have that little muffin. Wow. And it's just like, and you start a roller coaster when you do that, as you know, first of all, you just didn't shut down muscle protein breakdown. So it's continuing. So you're still breaking down. You're breaking down muscle. and you just raised your blood sugar, raised insulin, right? So which is going to drop your blood sugar, but insulin's still high, so you can't get the fat from your fat store. So now you're hungry.

You're breaking down muscle. You know, it's the worst state to be in. Wow. You've got your morning is the key. Like that sets the metabolic tone for the day. Mm. Before we move on, I'm just curious, Tesla, how much sugar does a skinny latte have? Can you look it up on the screen?

Skinny latte Star Wars. what size. Let's do a grande because a lot of people love their big coffee. And then you look at what people are really getting. It's like, I'm so fascinated. I always want to take pictures. And Tim's like, don't do that. You know, because you see what people are getting at the place to get the egg white wrap and then they get like the frappuccino. Yeah. I go, one does not cancel the other out. Right. Right. Right. I think it just goes back to like under education. Grandet latte. There we go. The skinny one. Well, it's really looking at those carbs of 28 and the sugars are 16. Yeah. Like that's crazy.

Nuts. That's crazy, especially when... In liquid form, right? Yeah, I was going to say, don't drink your sugar. Right. Talk a little bit more about that. Why is drinking your sugar? You know, like that's a fast hit.

At least people always go, well, what about fruit? I go, and apples very different than apple juice. Right. I was at Visions A Fest and I was doing a talk on sugar and I go, you know, apple juice is the worst. And Vission's mom was sitting right. He goes, my mom raised me on apple juice. I'm like, sorry, mom.

But it's like a Coke. It's got more. fructose than the fructose in a Coke. Now, an apple's fantastic because you have all that fiber, the pectin that's going to slow down gastric empeen, but you have it just as a juice. It's a slam. It's the worst. Apple juice concentrate, which by the way, this drives me nuts, on a label, you can say no sugar added and use apple juice concentrate. Wow. And it is worse for you than high fructose corn syrup. Like that is criminal. Here's a mom trying to make the right decision. She's going into the store, she sees the little yogurt for her kid and it says no sugar added. And it's got this

garbage fruit at the bottom that's been soaked in apple juice concentrate that just turned it into a Sunday. Anything else like that that you see people doing during their day that really throws them off? Like we talked about breakfast in particular, fruit in, you know, food. Well, how about the salad at lunch that they had? Let's talk about that. Yeah. Let's talk about the, well, maybe they went and they got this low fat salad with raspberry vinaigrette. It had some glazed walnuts on it and some cran raisins, right? And a little lettuce, maybe five, 10 calories of lettuce, some chicken breast, so that was good. A couple tomatoes. You know, a couple tomatoes. And it's basically a Sunday, a chicken Sunday, right? So you look at those things that people go have the Asian chicken salad,

right? They're just so much sugar in these salad dressings. And unless if you were tracking, you wouldn't really see that. That's why it's important to track. Oh, yeah. You just, once you see it, you can't unsee it and you'll like go, oh my gosh. What's your favorite dressings to replace? Oh, well, this is so easy. And the challenge is once you start to ask questions at restaurants, you'll realize that the majority of oil used at restaurants are blends. They're not extra virgin olive oil, but you can get these little packets of extra virgin olive oil you can travel with. So the easiest thing to do at a restaurant is either get extra virgin olive oil and a lemon or red wine vinegar or guacamole. Like you can always use a tablespoon or two of guacamole.

That's what if I'm going to Chipotle, that's my dressing, the guacamole or the salsa. But what you don't want to do is use their salad dressing because it for sure is a blend with sugar. It's basically pro-inflammatory oils plus sugar. Like, that's a very bad combo. Right. And like you said previously, something that you do occasionally on top of the base is one thing. But if every day at work, somebody's getting that same salad, that same component, and they're still not heading in the right direction towards their goals, they still feel like

every year they're putting on a couple of pounds. They feel like, what's going on with me? That's when you really have to look at everything that you're doing together and say, hey, what's actually going on? Well, and that is, again, I'm going to go back to using a biomepedon scale. Like if people get anything here, track, protein, biomepedon scale, lift-heavy stuff. If you're tracking, because if you're not tracking what your weight is made up of and your waist, waste relative to your height, it drove me crazy for years that they wouldn't talk about waist height.

I'm like, I'm six feet tall. My waist is not going to be the same as my five-foot-tall best friend. That's ridiculous. But if you are just tracking weight, because I've heard this so often, I weigh the same as I did when I was 30 and you're 60. I go, well, is it really the same? Because your weight might be the same. But if you have not been actively lifting weights, if you've just been doing cardio and some Pilates, I can pretty much guarantee you that it's not the same weight. What's the best and most straightforward way? Just like you kind of broke down the food side of

things and what that looks like in a day. Talk about with strain training. I think for a lot of women, especially in the 40 and older category, I think 40 and younger, it's really amazing because there's this resurgence and a lot of... It's not a resurgence. It's new. It's new. I can tell you since I've been around this forever, it's not a resurgence. Okay, so there's this new energy, right? Not to make it just completely about that because it's also kind of city and culture in LA. You see women of all different ages, which is beautiful and men too, working out prioritizing strength training, making it a part of their life, being excited, celebrating aging, like, you know, really showing the power of the body to transform. So I think for women under the age of 40,

maybe a little bit easier, more examples, more of their friends in it. But I think over 40, there's still a little bit of intimidation of even kind of going to the gym and like what to do. So what are some of the ways or best practices that you've seen that make this a sustainable part of somebody's life? Yes. And here's the mantra. Forget aging gracefully. Forget it. Age powerfully. That changes everything. And so to age powerfully, you got to lift heavy weights. Now, lift heavy weights. What does that mean? Heavy for you. Right now, depending on where you are, that might be doing air squats over a chair. That's fine. But you'll progress and it'll get harder. So you don't have to go to a gym. You can do this at home. You do it where you're comfortable.

For years, people go, I can't go to the gym. I don't have enough time. Well, first of all, I'd say make time. The number one reason people don't work out is they don't have time, but they have time for so many other things that do nothing for them. So I don't buy it. That's a so I don't have to statement, make time, but you don't have to go to the gym because a lot of people aren't comfortable at the gym. There's so many online resources now for working out. But here's the foundational stuff. And this is where exercise gets challenging. You know, as an exercise physiologist, there's a lot. There's a lot of So many different things for exercise. And there's cardiovascular training and then within cardiovascular training, there's anaerobic and aerobic like there's doing like very short bursts and then a little longer bursts and then longer than that burst and then steady state and then slow, right? So there's a cardiovascular training, there's flexibility, there's resistance. So lots of stuff here. So I'm going to give you the most important ones.

Specifically, and I think with the emphasis because you've already said it on strength training. Well, strength and power. Strength and power training. And, you know, as I looked at those stats, I will tell you I wasn't prioritizing power in my own workout, but also in just teaching it in general. And as I looked at it, I went, well, the biggest thing we lose is we age is power. And if you really think about what do we need? We've got, when you look at what does it mean to be fit, we need to be flexible.

So that's where I love to, hey, do yoga or Pilates once a week. But especially I love yoga because as you age, you've got to be able to get off the floor. you had to be able to stand on one leg. I mean, there's great studies just showing the ability to balance on one leg and correlating that with all-cause mortality. Can't stand on one leg, you die faster. Can't get off the floor unassisted, you die faster. So that's where yoga's great. We started doing yoga and I'm like, why am I doing this stupid thing here on one leg over there? You know, I don't want to do it. And then I read this stuff and I'm like, okay, I will do all of this stuff. So you've got to have the balance. You've got to have the flexibility. You have to have the

agility. And power's going to help you do that. Why do it? people fall, they lose that. So it's muscle strength power, but the priority is really power, strength, muscle. Got it. And there are different types of training. Like in my grad thesis work, it was all on how do I create strength the fastest. That's not how you create muscle mass the fastest. Strength is like one to five reps, heaviest weight you can handle. Power is movement over time and really like, you know, fast moving it, right? And then strength is doing repeated sets really in more like an 8 to 30 rep range. So when you're designing something, and I don't want to confuse people, first thing I'm going to say is you want to do, you're not training to get better at training.

You're training to be better at life, all those daily activity things you do. And in life, we are not bolted to the floor. So if everything you're doing at the gym, on machines, that doesn't translate as well to everyday life. So ideally, and this is where I love a TRX machine, because it can help support you as you start to go through these movements. So a squat is one that's fantastic. And you'll hear people say, I can't do that because of my back or my knee or whatever. Use a TRX machine to assist you.

You can do a squat, you can do a one-legged squat. And you use less and less of holding on as you get better at it until you don't have to hold on until you can use dumbbells or hold a weight here and do a goblet scot. So a squat is such a good functional movement. And someone might say they have a bad back. That was why I did the thesis work I did. It was all spinal lifting biomechanics and that if you strengthen your quads, you would have a better back, right? You would take the pressure off. If you have a bad back, you better be good at squatting because you're going to have to get up and down off the toilet, out of a chair, out of a low car. You have to do these things, right?

The next one is a bent over row. And that is literally where you're bending over at the waist with your knees bent and you're pulling weights up because that's getting groceries out of the car. That's picking something up. Picking your luggage up. Right. So both a bent over row and a deadlift, these are such functional things that we do. And would you say generally for most people, again, if they're not used to incorporating the power, the strength, the resistance training that's there, you know, if you're serious about it, and it's, and it's, you know, if you're serious about it. It's like this is your life, right?

This is your longevity. This is the rest of your years. If you're not serious about it, get serious about it. Get serious about it. Which means for most people it's going to be better, at least for a little while to probably work with some local trainer. Yes. Here's the thing.

There's so many ways to do this because if you're thinking, well, I can't afford that. You don't need to work with the trainer every single time. Get the program set with the trainer. And hey, if it's a stretch, get a friend to do it with you, which is even better or a small group. Learn the moves. Dial in your form. Form overweight every single time. Before you add a weight, you better have your form dialed. Because, you know, when you really look at how people get injured, it's not usually at the gym. They'll get injured at the gym if they aren't not using good form. So form is first. That's why we need mirrors and to really feel it and to offset any

imbalances that we have. So I think working with a trainer is essential or a physical therapist. get these down. So a squat, a deadlift, a bent over row, a pushup. I just did a YouTube video on all these because you can take a pushup. You can do a pushup against a wall. You can do a pushup against a bench. You can do a push up on your hands and knees as a tabletop. You can do a pushup on your toes. You can keep making that push up harder and harder and harder until you get to the point where you're doing jumping pushups, right, with a clap or you're doing one arm pushups. So there's no end to pushups. the other one that's super important, especially for women, you know, when they talk about bone density, they're like, walk. I go, that's not going to cut it. You need to axial load your spine. Like if you

look at where we have issues, spine and hips, if you're doing an overhead press, and what's an overhead press? It's putting your luggage in the top part, right, in the upper compartment in the airplane. So overhead dumbbell presses are fantastic. So those things, when you look at it, we've got your hips hinging, right? We've got upper body pushing. That's going to be your chest and your triceps. We've got upper body pulling. I actually do pull-ups and I think women should do pull-ups or hangs. I know they're like, oh my gosh, but if you just can hang, that's amazing for improving your grip strength. And grip strength is absolutely correlated with all cause mortality. So those simple things can make all the difference. And there's a lot of room to improve.

And they don't need much. You can have some dumbbells at home and a TRX. machine. So it's easy enough to do to start at home if that's where you're comfortable. Are they targeting a minimum amount of working out on a week, right, for strain training in particular? Yeah. So the best thing that you can do is to hit each body part, minimally two days a week. Now, if someone's listening, I might go, but you forgot core, because I have my core four program and it's upper body pushing upper body pulling hips and thighs and power core. But the reality is, if you are doing swats and deadlifts and pushups, you are actually doing your core because it's engaged through all of that. It has to be. That's why it's

so much nicer to do a push-up than like a seated chest press. Because a seeded chest press, I don't have to engage my core. I can just sag, whatever, right? But if I'm doing a push-up, I have to engage my core. If I'm doing an overhead press, I have to engage my core. So your core is engaged in all these. You want to hit each body part at least. two times a week, three is really better. And I think since we are working against time here, three is better. For strength, for muscular hypertrophy, the range was funny when I was in school way back when it was eight to 12 reps, multiple sets. And because you only grow a fiber you recruit, and you're not going to recruit them all the first sets. So you do multiple sets with like 60 to 90 second

rest breaks so that you can recruit more and more and more. Now we know it can be up to 30 reps, which is important because if someone is concerned lifting heavier weights, because you have to get to the point where you feel like you really can't do another one. You're really close to that. And for most people, they're not there. They could go harder. And so if it's scary for you to lift heavier, you can go longer. It just hurts. I don't like it. It's like, I make myself do that every once in a while. I'm like, we're going to do a long day. And I'm like, oh, I ate it so much. So for strength and what you can do is throw in a strength day once a week or do a week of strength. A strength is really one to five sets and that I do,

I'll do that like for a week every four to six weeks and it's hard. And you take, you'll need like two to three minutes to recover. Now, I like to once a week throw in some power exercises. So for someone starting out, let's say squatting, that could just be doing a little squat jump. You just added in some power. You can jump at our gym. We have all sorts of little soft boxes. So you could jump onto a box and step down. It can be doing a little kettlebell swing. So something that involves moving faster. Yeah.

And for anybody that's listening that's not even there yet, it's like just work with the trainer. They're going to walk you through a lot of this. They are. They are. They're going to walk you through and they're going to meet you at where you're at. So if you're like, I'm not leaving my house and there's no trainer around here, there are virtual trainers who can do this too.

For sure. Throw the camera on you, watch your form. You can literally start with some bands and dumbbells. I'm a big, big fan of TRX. No affiliation. They should really hire me. But I'm a huge fan of TRX because there's so much you can do with this. And then the other thing that you can also use, if you, let's say, are restricted in any way, have an injury, are recovering from something.

Because one of the biggest things that throws people off their program is an injury or sickness. and blood flow restriction bands allow you to get to that fatigue at a lower weight. So if you have any of those issues, Google blood flow restriction bands. The person who created all of this was this Dr. Katsu, K-A-A-T-S-U, and that's like a $1,600 unit,

but you can get the regular ones are like $100, so you can always do that too. So there's the reason I'm pointing that out, there's no excuse. There's always a way. I remember when I had a knee surgery and I go to the gym, hop around, was lifting my weights, used to Schwinn-Arodine with one leg and arms. I'm like, find a way.

There's always a way. That's a great message. And it just goes back to this idea of strength training. People are listening. It's like, that sounds tough, but it should be tough. Yes, it is. It is tough. I don't remember I said a mentor of mine who kind of shared this quote with me.

He said, either you kick your ass or life will kick your ass. Life will still kick your ass, but you'll be better prepared for it. Yeah. Right? You'll be able to kick back. You'll be able to kick back, right? At least protect yourself. Well, and the other thing that we've done is we go to this one place in Tampa called Camp Tampa where we do yoga.

And we're like the old folks, the cute old couple in the yoga class, right? And this place is really cool. It's got three different buildings. One's some kind of a weight circuit class. One was this hit thing. And then we just would go to sound healing and hot yoga. And the hot yoga was hard. Like it's not a little restorative yoga class.

This is like crow. You know, so we're like, we're holding our own here with these 20-year-old yogi girls. We see that there's this other class there. We know that we need to push ourselves harder on our hit training. So we sign up for that. We go over there and they're like, aren't you the yoga people? You sure you want to go to this? This is an intimidating class.

We walk into it. It's like black walls. It says grind time. It's got like disco music and lights and self-propelled treadmills down one lane. all these kettlebells and bands and step benches on the other. And we're like, we got this. You know, we killed ourselves because literally we were like, could have been everyone's parents, maybe in grandparents in the room. But what it really showed me, too, is we've got to keep trying different things and pushing ourselves. That's where a trainer can be great. That's where going to

a class can be great. A, it's going to keep you young, learning new skills hugely important. But holy smokes, I didn't push myself that hard. I'll push myself really hard with weights. I will just absolutely do it. But sprinting, uh-uh. I need to be in a class where I'm like going to compete with everyone around me. What does it feel like to you to know that you are as fit as you are at the age that you're at? I'm actually the fittest I think I've ever been, which is super cool.

I just did my body fat again because I was like, I'm going to be 60. Like look at this. I like literally just. You're right. I went, all right, like, this is an opportunity. And I think we need to approach aging like this because, you know what, you weed out the week. I know that's, it's like all of a sudden it's like you're fit and in your 20s, everyone's fit. But all of a sudden in your 60s, no, like Bark System's the only one, right? You know. What's possible for you in your life, right? When you look around your friends, you know,

the people that have been in this industry, colleagues, you know, from high school, college, other stuff, you're looking around right now, you know, what are the things that you can do or even what's the mindset you have that maybe the folks that haven't prioritized that or haven't gotten serious about it, that they don't have. Right. And here's the thing. If you haven't prioritized it yet, hopefully through this series, you're going, I am in because it is never too late to start. I mean, my husband's always been active, he's always been athletic, but the shift that he's made in the last six months, kind of so I was like, now you get, I robbed the cradle, but I'm like, now it's your turn

to get inspired for your 60th birthday, like let's go. Like, you have the opportunity now because you have more knowledge, more access to things, and probably more time to really do these things. And all of a sudden you look and you go, I'm going to be able to do all this cool stuff for years. I remember we were in Santorini and the stairs. Have you been to Santorini? I haven't know. So like to go to any hotel, you are like hiking up and down the stairs. Meanwhile, the guys carrying the luggage are like throwing your suitcases over their shoulders and running up and down the stairs. And I'm thinking, I want to be able to come here. We went down to a restaurant in Santorini and we walked all the way down these stairs. Everyone took burrows

up and we walked all the way back up it. And I want, I want to be able to do this at 70, at 80, at 90. And so what do I need to do? Like, because you think about it, we work so hard. My dad, worked so hard his whole life because he had this plan for what he was going to do when he retired, you know, the boat and the travel and everything else, and then retires, gets cancer, and he's gone, like, whole thing. So you look and go, what do I need to do right now so that I can actually feel better than I ever have because it's possible. I think we don't think that. I remember when I was in Dr. Phil, he was like, you know, don't think you're going to be able to be where you were in high school. I'm like, yeah, you're not going to be. You're going to be so much.

better than that. So much better than that, right? So what if you approached it that way of like game on? I'm going to train now for the fun, cool stuff that I want to be able to do in a decade, two decades, three decades. When it comes to this topic and it comes to women, you know, women often have the burden of taking care of the whole family, right? Like everything is on their shoulders, right? And there's a conversation that I feel that needs to be had inside of that, which is this idea of reminding them that they have the permission to prioritize themselves. Yes. In a society that doesn't often allow for that. Can we talk about that?

No one else is going to do that for you. So if you don't decide that you're the priority, no one's going to go, you know what you should do today? You should take some self-care time. Why don't you do that? Like no one has ever said that to me, ever. ever. So when I wrote the miracle mindset book that we did years ago, we did a podcast on, that was the clear thing. I remember standing in the hospital the night my son had been a victim of a hit and run at 16, literally left for dead in the street. The doctors told us to let him die.

We overruled them and got him to harbor UCLA, which is the number two trauma center in the country and just a miracle working hospital. But that first night, I'm standing in the hospital. I'm like, okay, I have a 15 year old at home. I'm two hours away. I have a 16 year old literally between life and death. And I have no idea how long is this going to be, you know, a week and he'll be fine or is this forever? I have no idea. And I have the virgin diet coming out in a month. The launch starts. And I've invested everything that I possibly have in it. I'm the financial support for my family. And if that doesn't go, I will not be able to take care of my son. holy smokes I didn't say smokes so what do I need to do I'm not going to leave my son thankfully my the kid's dad was taking care of Bryce I'm not leaving here and this book has to go

and I thought you know the only way I'm going to pull this off is to make sure that I get enough sleep that I eat correctly that I exercise that I managed my stress literally this was running through my mind now I walked in very healthy and I called my friends and I'm like, help. Like Dr. Hyla Kass walks in with all of our adrenal supplements. Dr. Daniel Lehman walks in with all the stuff to help grant. I was like, help. But I prioritized my self-care because I knew that there was no way I could, first of all,

you can't go into the pediatric ICU with a sniffle, much less like, you know, being totally sick. So I had to, under that amount of stress to be at the top of my game. What if we all live like that? You never know when these things are going to come up. we literally are being faced with challenges all the time. I can't face a challenge if I'm not at my best self. Like I can. None of us can.

Who can? You know, I remember when I was in high school, I would like sneak in my bed at night and take the flashlight and study because my mom was like, go to sleep. You know, that won't help you. And she was right. Of course, moms always are. But, you know, you got to prioritize your sleep, you're eating, your exercise. Then you can really do the best for everybody. And we all say it, but we then we don't do it because we feel guilty doing it.

I'd say you've got to start to feel guilty if you're not being the best role model for your family of what it means to truly take great care of yourself. Because if you don't take great care of yourself, I always ask women if I'm coaching them, do you want your daughters to behave like this? Because they will. They're watching, right? Right. They look up to you. They'll role model you as well. Oh, that's a powerful message. On that note, while we have our time here as we're winding down, I wanted to just briefly touch on two topics real quickly as part of that stack that you mentioned. And that's stress and then also you've chatted a little bit about it, sleep.

As women age and when it comes to menopause, perimenopause, you know, that whole combination of things, are there any things that are important for them to keep in mind on these topics that you've seen with all the work, all the clients, all the books that you've written, all the women you've coached. Let's talk about sleep first, then we'll talk about stress. Okay. Oh, I'm so excited about stress. Doesn't that sound bizarre? You want to do stress first? Well, let's just, we can just deal with sleep because I think it's actually even easier in a way. We don't need less sleep as we age. We need more, just like protein and exercise, like all of those, right? So I think with women so often, we're

We don't prioritize our sleep. So that's a biggie. The things that we have to look at as we're starting to go into menopause is that we have more issues and this will feed directly into stress. What are the hormones that tend to go up during menopause? Cortisol and insulin. Like talk about a way to pack belly fat on, but also to really mess up your sleep. And so, you know, number one, just like you're tracking your food and you're tracking your body

composition, I am a huge believer in tracking sleep. Now, with a caveat, we're both an Apple watch and an aura ring. So does my husband with the big joke of like, which one was better? Because one of the challenges I started to do as I was tracking my sleep and I saw that it got a crappy night's sleep is then I let that kind of dictate my day and I go, knock that off. But use it for information to go, wow, you know, we actually found these super cool Phillips Hugh light bulbs that you can program on your phone to make your bedroom red at night. It is the greatest thing. So like I discovered all the blue light at night really messes me up like everybody else. So like you learn your habits and what you need to do to really prioritize your sleep and

tracking this thing to help there. Now cortisol is that thing that tends to go up as we're going into menopause, which just makes that whole thing worse. And I during the pandemic finally I have avoided dealing with my stress side forever. I would deal with my stress side doing high-intensity interval training because it helps train your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better and taking supplements because I didn't want to do the other thing, right? The other thing being like, you know, I would use tapping sometimes, I would use meditation, but I never, it was not a consistent thing.

And during the pandemic, I decided that I should go to Dr. Joe's week. long retreat. First of all, because there was nothing else to do, right? And so I go to the first one with a group of friends, and I didn't really pay attention to what I was going to. I will admit it. I listened to his books, like breaking the habit of being yourself. You had some homework before you went to the retreat to listen to his trainings and then to do the meditations, but I did not do the meditations because I was going to a meditation retreat. So why would I do that? I'll do them there, right? And so I get there. And it's 35. hours. It's first of all, you start between 4 a.m. and 5, 6 a.m. every morning and you finish around

7, 8 o'clock at night. It's all these lectures and 35 hours of meditation. I'd never done more than 20 minutes of meditation. I never really done it because I was thinking about all things I need to do. So now all of a sudden, except for 40 years as end when I did that with Dave, because I thought I could get done with it in a week and then be done. That's like deciding you're going to do all your workouts in a week and then never work out again. So as I'm going to go. through this first week and watching everyone around me have these profound experiences and I'm in the middle of my head, I went, you know what? This is like training your nervous system, just like you would train your musculoskeletal system. This is training your nervous system. And I wouldn't ever think

that I could train my muscular skeletal system for a week and be done. So I am going to double down on this. I went back. I did it in April. I did it in June. I did it in September. By then I'm now friends with Dr. Joe and having dinner with him and like telling him all this stuff. And in September, I'm having dinner with him. And I said, you know, I've been doing this for six months. I've now been doing it, by the way, for almost for over a year and a half, whatever, like two years. Yeah. But at that point, I've been doing it six months, which was my first commitment. And I go, the weirdest thing happened. I'm meditating. I didn't change anything in what I eat or exercise. And I lost five pounds. Wow. We see that when people start sleeping well, but basically, I had lived my life

forever in flight or fight. And all of a sudden, my body, and I'd had chronic shortness of breath my entire adult life. At first I was like, it's exercise induced asthma. I was like in so much denial. I go to this pulmonologist, he goes, it's anxiety. Oh, it's not anxiety. You know, It's like I just lived like this chronically. And all of a sudden I went, I haven't had shortness of breath since. Like it's gone. Like dropped five pounds. I was like, and he goes, yeah.

So Dr. Joe says, you know, you're going to become nobody, nowhere, and nothing. And he goes, yeah, it's called the nothing diet. That's really funny. But I say that because quite often we think, oh, I just need to cut my calories more. I need to work out harder. It's like, if you are not addressing these hidden areas of what I call weight loss resistance, poor sleep, chronic stress, chronic stress, think about what it does to you, it makes your gut more permeable.

Now you will have food intolerances. That will create inflammation. That causes insulin resistance and causes cravings and weight gain. It will mess up your serotonin and your dopamine. So all of a sudden, you're craving more food and it's not Brussels sprouts and broccoli and salmon, right? It will mess up your serotonin that will mess up your melatonin and mess up your sleep. It will break down muscle.

It will raise blood sugar. I used to see clients early on that would have, you know, everything made sense. Their triglycerides look great. Their cholesterol look great. And they had this bizarro elevated blood sugar and it was stress. So like this is that thing that you can't just ignore. And I'm ridiculous that I ignored it for as long as I did. So it's like a, you know, cautionary tale.

If you're one of those people out there that's like, okay, I'll just do more hit training to handle it. Like, you know, the meditation commitment, like going to Dr. Joe's and then going and now you do this every morning. I'm like, I don't have time for this. The craziest thing is meditating in the mornings has given me so much time. I can solve so much there. I'll just like get things done in the quantum.

It's like I save so much time, you know? So huge, huge draw. And you don't have a lot of your day, constantly reacting to things, the inertia of everything that's there. Oh, this is even funnier that you brought that up. So my team goes, you know, we've been tracking you since you started this meditation. And we would like you to keep going because the difference is unbelievable. Like, yeah, nothing.

Like I'm just, I am in the color code is super red. I am in a quick start on Colby. I'm a super like, would be very reactive. And it's like, yeah. you know it's like now I can just take a breath pause it's quite a gift so whatever someone's bliss is again there's so many options out there find the thing that works for you it's it's like that missing element of wellness that really you can't be truly healthy without a great reminder and I so appreciate you opening up about not just that but so many other aspects you know as you

mentioned, we did a whole podcast about the miracle mindset, everything you went through your son. By the way, how's your son doing today? He was doing a lot better and then got re-injured. So, thankfully, I have the most amazing team. Shout out to Dr. Daniel Amon. Yeah, yeah. Dr. Kara Hopner, Dr. Kat Toops. I mean, I've like the most incredible people around me. And so we just went back into it and started healing it again. So, you know, it's been a frustrating journey, but on the other hand, like he's here. We did a 10-year kind of birthday party for him because this was someone who wasn't supposed to live through the night. So he was like, I'm just so grateful to be here. And obviously, you know, hit and run extreme example of some of the things that can happen in the

zigz and zags of life, but we're all going to have something, some event, some situation, the loss of a loved one, some situation, something that's there. Yeah, I'd say plural. Right? Plural for some people that are out there. And it's, it's a lot of, and it's, you know, It's just another reminder of why we need that core element of resilience, feeling good, strain training, eating well, taking care of our body because if we can't show up for ourselves, we're not the best person for everybody else around us. Amen. Amen.

JJ, this has been great. Talk a little bit about your world of how people can keep in touch. You have some great products out there as well, too, a podcast of your own, which I've been seeing like higher and higher on the charts. So, yeah, talk a little bit about that. Thank you. Well, we rebranded it. I'm in love with this name.

I did not think of it. The team did well beyond 40. Yeah. And it really is. My whole focus now is aging powerfully and helping women go, wow, this is really my time. It's prime time. Let's go. So that we are now building the podcast channel two.

Like I'm back. I got back so reinvigorated. There was something about the 60th birthday. I've got a new book that's going to be coming out next year. like we're building. I just was like this, I'm so fired up. I'm like more excited. I feel like everything that I studied in my 20s that I was talking about back then and I was getting like bashed for like early on I said your body's not a bank account. It's a chemistry lab and it was like I said the earth is really flat. You know, I mean people were like that's not true. You know,

so I just feel like it's all come full circle and I'm so excited about. I'm more excited about what's going on now because now we have such great tools too. Yeah. And then I was back then. So it's really fun. So yeah, now I'm really doubling down on my Instagram and YouTube and the podcast. And we did a really fun eat protein first challenge just for seven days. Again, like everything is like, just do this. Like just one thing. I love the book by Gary Keller, that one thing. One of my favorite books. Right? I have to, I always say I should read it every day. Because as an entrepreneur, what do you want to do? Everything. No, do one thing. Do it really well. So, there was so much stuff that we talked about here, and I'm sure in this series there'll be a lot of

things. And as you're listening, there's probably that one thing that you go, oh, that, because you just continue to build on that. You turn back, you know, we started at beginning of year with all these crazy things we want to do, and we do none of them. But if we just started whenever we start with one thing, we can look back a year later and go, look at all the stuff that changed. Such an important reminder. JJ, this has been fantastic. I'm so glad it worked out. You're in LA. Podcast ended up happening. Can't wait to have you back on in the future again. We'll link to all your websites and show notes in the show notes and products and Instagram and everything. Please follow JJ. The podcast is great. In fact, your last episode is a perfect continuation of this

conversation here where you go into all the weight loss tips that you suggest for individuals that are 40 plus. We covered some of them here. Oh yes. And I did my strength training on YouTube too. We're actually building out a gym in the house so that I can do all of my, I'm going to, I'm going to, It's like I'm totally going back to my roots so that I can start doing all the videos to make this so accessible. That's what I really want to do. I love that. I love that. We'll link to that as well.

Thank you so much, JJ. Thank you. Such a pleasure. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me.

And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health.

We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This, or just go to Drew Perot.com, that's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T-com, and click on the tab that says, try this.