Weight Loss Expert Shares Top Ways To Burn Stubborn Belly Fat And Achieve Optimal Body Composition In Your 40's, 50's, And Beyond with JJ Virgin

This episode focuses on effective strategies for sustainable fat loss and maintaining optimal body composition, particularly targeting those in their 40s, 50s, and beyond.

1. Focus on Protein: Start meals with protein to improve satiety and overall food choices, which supports fat burning and muscle preservation.
2. Monitor Body Metrics: Use tools like a bluetooth-enabled tape measure to regularly track waist and hip measurements, ensuring progress in fat loss.
3. Resistance Training: Incorporate resistance exercises to maintain muscle mass, crucial for improving metabolism and insulin sensitivity.
4. Thermic Effect of Food: Understand how different macronutrients impact metabolism, with protein having a significant thermic effect.
5. Lifestyle Integration: Implement practical lifestyle changes such as blue light blocking in the evening and regular movement breaks to enhance overall metabolic health.

1: Introduction to Fat Loss

Discusses the importance of distinguishing between fat loss and weight loss, with a focus on strategies that target fat reduction specifically around the waist.
JJ Virgin: "We don't lose weight to get healthy; we get healthy to lose weight."

2: Importance of Protein

Emphasizes eating protein first to reduce cravings and make better dietary choices.
JJ Virgin: "Eating protein first helps control blood sugar levels and reduces cravings."

3: Tracking Progress

Highlights the benefits of measuring body composition changes over time to ensure targeted fat loss.
JJ Virgin: "What we measure and monitor, we can improve."

4: Resistance Training

Explains how building muscle through resistance training can enhance metabolic rate and insulin sensitivity.
JJ Virgin: "Muscle is the place where we can start to restore insulin sensitivity."

5: Lifestyle Tips

Offers practical advice on integrating healthy habits into daily routines, like using blue light blocking glasses to improve sleep quality.
JJ Virgin: "Honoring circadian rhythms is crucial for metabolic health."

1. Measure Your Progress: Use a digital tape measure weekly to track changes in body dimensions.
2. Increase Protein Intake: Prioritize protein at every meal to enhance satiety and metabolic health.
3. Incorporate Resistance Training: Regularly engage in resistance training exercises to maintain muscle mass and improve metabolic rate.
4. Use Thermogenic Foods: Include foods in your diet that increase metabolic rate, focusing on those high in protein.
5. Regular Movement Breaks: Integrate movement into your daily routine to avoid prolonged periods of inactivity, which can hinder metabolic health.

This episode is brought to you by BON CHARGE, Plunge, and Lifeforce.

When tackling weight loss, most people turn to the tried-and-true methods of cutting calories and increasing exercise. But what if these tactics don't deliver results? How do we safeguard against losing muscle instead of fat? It's time for a paradigm shift: prioritize body recomposition over simply shedding pounds. After all, it's not just about weight loss—it's about crafting a healthier, more resilient body as we age.

Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with JJ Virgin to discuss her top weight loss, muscle building, and vibrant aging strategies. She emphasizes the importance of resistance training for sustained weight loss and tracking individual goals for long-term motivation. Additionally, she shares the secrets she’s learned in her 20-plus years as a celebrity nutritionist, including the most common mistakes women make when trying to lose belly fat, the importance of adding in versus removing, and how to age 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. Virgin actively contributes to the health and wellness community through speaking engagements, online programs, and her podcast, Well Beyond 40. Her expertise extends beyond nutrition and weight loss as she advocates for a holistic approach to health that encompasses mindset, exercise, and emotional well-being.

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A
For women that are struggling to burn fat, dial in their body composition and lose belly fat because it's a big topic. A lot of people care about that. What are a few hacks that you have that can help them get to that place of sustained fat loss, which is different than weight loss. Yes. And by the way, it's different.

B
And the most important, as we know. And that brings up the very first topic of, you've got to know what you're looking at, because how would you know if you lost fat or weight unless you were actually looking? Now, this can be a simple. Because most of the time when people want to lose fat, they want to lose the fat around their waist. They want to lose that visceral adipose tissue, right?

So just simply having a tape measure. So once a week, you do your waist and weight and hips. So you have a waist to hip. And I call waist to height measurement. And there is actually a bluetooth tape measure by Renpho, $30 on Amazon.

Greatest thing ever. It reads right into your phone. So you just do this every week. That way you know if things are going in the right direction. So I say that first, because what we measure and monitor, we can improve.

There are so many cool things that you can do to help your body use fat for fuel. Remember, we don't lose weight to get healthy. We have to get metabolically healthy so their body can burn fat and hold on to rebuild muscle. And for me, I always think the biggest needle mover is what's at the end of your fork. Right.

That's the biggest easy way to change. And I love what one of my first mentors said to me. He said, add before you take away. Because when you think of the typical diet culture, typical diet culture, it's okay. What am I not going to have?

And I don't know about you, but the minute someone tells me I can't have something, what do I want? Right? The thing. So the very first thing is to just start to eat protein first, is to really optimize and prioritize protein. So, first of all, figure out how much protein you should be eating each day, which I'm sure is more than what you're eating, having now seen so many different diet recalls over the years.

And basically you want to think of 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Then I have people eat that first at each meal, because if they do, they actually ate it. Which sounds really silly, but I hear too often, oh, I got too full right now. The research also shows that when you eat protein first, you make better food choices overall. You'll also have that good blood sugar control, just like as if you ate vegetables.

My rule is eat your protein first, then add your non starchy vegetables. But you also get a thermic effect of food like metabolism is dictated by four things. Number one, your basal metabolic rate. That's really the biggest way you can change that is how much muscle mass you have on number two is how much you move. And that's divided into two things, non exercise and exercise.

And so that's one, that's two and three. And then number four is your thermic effect of food, of which fat doesn't really have a thermic effect. Carbohydrates is minimal. So the big needle mover there is protein. So protein is going to have a better metabolic effect.

It's also more satiating, it's also more satisfying. And those are two different things. Satiating means you're not as hungry. We know it's one of the ways we can raise glp one. But satisfying means you don't have the cravings and probably because of the amino acids making the neurotransmitters.

So that's the first one is eat protein first. And if you are trying to lose weight overall, which means you're going to be in a little bit of caloric restriction, this can help you hold on to lean body mass, fat free mass, as you do so, which is mission critical. So eating protein first, literally, what does that look like at breakfast, for example? So at breakfast, that could be. And I always have to caveat these, because in the virgin diet, I discovered that so many people had leaky gut and were reacting to dairy and eggs doesn't mean they can't ever eat them.

It means they need to heal their gut. So assuming that you're fine with those, it could be two eggs and four to six egg whites with some, like, I love to make a scramble of those with a little bit of feta cheese and spinach and mushrooms. It could be a greek style yogurt, maybe I like to stir in if I'm going to do that, some collagen as well, even though that's not a complete protein. But it could be some greek style yogurt. It could be a protein shake.

Let's say you're plant based, a pea or pea rice combo so that you're getting in. If you're plant based, I say 40 grams. If you're doing animal, you can probably go more like 30 because you're really looking for the right essential amino acid levels. And for plant, it tends to be not as bioavailable and digestible. And so you're looking for at least two and a half to 3 grams of leucine.

So that's where that's coming from. Now, a hack here that I think needs to be out there a lot more, especially as we age, and the studies are pretty interesting on this, is that you can hack this by taking some essential amino acids alongside it. And I actually think that everyone over 50, this is a good thing to put into play because it's sort of like your essential amino acid insurance policy. So you have breakfast and you also have a serving of essential amino acids. That way you know you got what you needed.

And as we age, we tend to be more anabolic resistant, so we have more challenges using those essential amino acids and being able to go through muscle protein synthesis. So this helps kind of push past that. So that's the other piece that I put in. Like this morning, I had breakfast. I had a little hit of essential amino acids alongside it.

A
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And just so everybody's aware that you're talking, that's a supplement. It's a powDer. And you add it to, like, you add it to water and you drink it. Yeah. Essential amino acids taste icky, so they always have a flavor to them.

B
They're still not fabulous. You know, it just is what it is. But they're easy enough to take a little glass of water and take a hit. They're not gonna make up for not eating protein. But as you mentioned, they're an insurance policy.

Exactly. It's just like supplements. Don't make up for, you know, eating a crappy diet. So that was number one, eat protein first. And just a little bit of a recap on that.

A
How is that connected back to fat and burning fat? You get full, you don't eat a lot of the quote unquote bad stuff for the things that aren't as supportive or actually lead to excess fat in the body, you get the thermogenic effect of protein, because protein takes a lot to process in the body. So it's burning calories itself in that you're supporting your muscle mass. Your lean muscle mass is active in itself. It's metabolically active.

It's going to be burning fat throughout the day, especially if you're resistance training and maintaining that lean muscle mass. Anything else I missed on that? Those are the key ones. Those are super key. And I think we've got to really think about protecting lean mass because this is ultimately where we're going to start to be able to burn our fat and boost our metabolism.

B
And that leads me to number two, is we've got to make sure that we're doing some type of resistance training, but for a couple different reasons. One of them is you would think of resistance training of, okay, more muscle, better metabolism. Yes. I mean, if you look at one of the challenges that happens as we lose weight, we lower our metabolic rate, we can offset some of that by having more muscle. But the other reason that muscle is so important is because it is the place where we can start to restore insulin sensitivity.

So what happens as we age? And I am convinced that a lot of what happens as we age isn't really because of aging. I think it's because of how we behave as we age. We're not as active as we used to be. We are tending to eat kind of more.

Oh, gosh, what are the foods like? You go out to dinner? I don't know. When I was in college, I wasn't going out to dinner and eating some of the things that I had access to in my thirties and forties and fifties. Right.

So we're not exercising as much. We might be eating a little bit more indulgent foods, maybe we're drinking a little bit more. We're stressed like we didn't used to be. We're not sleeping like we used to. Those things can cause insulin resistance.

And if you're insulin resistant, it's very hard for you to use stored fat for fuel. You are being more likely to lay down belly fat. So one of the quickest ways to start to restore that is resistance training. So resistance training has to be put in there. And that's really that one two punch protein resistance training, so that we are making sure that we're holding on to our building muscle mass, and we're gonna have a better basal metabolic rate, better insulin sensitivity.

And so that's the second one that kind of goes into overall movement because I've been really thinking about what is the best way to help us move more. When you look at the CDC recommendations for exercise, which is 150 minutes a week. Right. And now they've added in two days of strength training, but they didn't say what it was. So I'm like, well, how does someone make sense of any of this stuff?

But then you look at the research that's just come out, showing that if you work out 30 minutes a day and sit eleven and a half hours a day, you basically erase it. Right. I think that we've been thinking about this all wrong. I actually think that when you look at all of this again, if I'm looking at, okay, someone wants to lose body fat, especially belly fat, I always want to give them the quickest wins possible because I know for most of us, we're so frustrated and things just don't seem to be working. A lot of it's because we're so metabolically unhealthy that we're looking for quick wins to just have a sign that something's working right.

So that's where protein's so helpful, because if you're hungry, all bets are off. And if you're craving, all bets are off. And so protein is always first. But I think that we really have to think about moving more. And I love the, I don't like the term exercise snacks because I was using it the other day and someone literally said, drew, they go, we get to eat while we're working out.

I'm like, no, I'm thinking micro doses might be a better term. Although maybe now they'll think we're taking mushrooms while we're working out. I don't know. But when you look at this, if we first started just by tracking and anything I do, I like to track first. And if you first started and went, okay, how many steps am I actually getting in a day?

Do you know what the average person is getting in, in terms of steps per day? I think I saw it was 4000 or less. Yeah, 3500 to 4000. That's crazy. I'm actually working with someone right now who we are working on 200 pound weight loss, and he was moving 2500 steps a day.

On a good day.

A
When you track, a lot of people see that they thought they were super active. They're like, oh, I'm like, running around my house. I'm walking here, I'm walking there. But when you actually track, a lot of people are shocked to see they're not as active as they think they are. And that really, before resistance training, that should be step one.

B
Let's start first with tracking. And I find that just by tracking, guess what's going to happen? You're actually going to start to move more. Right? And we use our phone for so many of our dopamine hits.

Let's just use our phone with an oura ring and just dopamine hit. That activity of seeing how much you can get throughout the day, not saving it. I'm always aware, like, I already know where my steps are today. Where am I? Because I know where I want to be by, like midday.

Like, I don't want to end up 09:00 at night and go, oh, shoot, I've got 4000 steps so far. I'm in trouble. I'm heading out. Although my husband seen me do it, I'm like, I'm heading out. Gotta go for a walk.

But you want to also distribute this all throughout the day. So if our first step here was really just to move more, when you think of your overall metabolism, that non exercise activity, thermogenesis, that can be anywhere from, you know, 1000 to 2000 calories a day, it can be a substantial amount of movement, more than the exercise can. Like I look at exercise for the metabolic effect of building muscle and improving. Vo two max, like traditional resistance training. You'Re saying, and we'll talk hit.

But I look at really losing that fat. Is this movement all throughout the day. Constantly moving, taking breaks. What's your general rule of thumb that could be easy for people to follow? A suggestion you give to your clients, like, hey, sit this amount of time and then let's get up and move on average.

I had a friend who made this shock band, Pavlok, and his whole thing was to shock people so they didn't smoke. And I'm like, gosh, I need that thing now to just to shock people every hour or two to go get up. I mean, but you can set that on your watch is, I think we have to really be thinking about every one to 2 hours. What can we do to get up? Even if it's ten air squats, right.

And with the person that I talked about who was at 2500 steps a day and had 200 plus pounds to lose. You don't just go from 2000 to 10,000. So the first thing I went was 2500 to three to four. We're at five right now, steps, steps per day, 5000 steps a day. But then the other thing that I added in and anyone can do this, let's say that you right now go, oh, I'm doing 4000 steps a day.

Let's just increase that. Let's add 1000 and let's start to look at how much can we get by noon. How much can we get in? So every couple hours can we get up? Maybe we're doing ten push ups against a desk.

Maybe we're doing ten air squats. I think that we make this such a big deal that we either do all of it or none of it. In fact, there was a study they looked at years ago and we didn't know then any of this information. They literally looked at people who were told to walk 30 minutes a day or ten minutes three times a day. And what they looked at the end of the study is, oh, they figured it would be the 30 minutes a day people that did better because back then it was all of that.

If you can't work out for at least 30 minutes, don't work out. Remember that. I don't remember that. But you're younger than me. Back when I was in grad school, everything was about being in this zone, this target heart rate zone, and that in order for your body to start really burning fat, you had to be doing it for at least 30 minutes.

It's the most ridiculous thing ever. Wow, it sounds super ridiculous. I mean, now we're now like, what are you talking about? But, so when they did the study, they figured this isn't going to do anything. Well, they got better results and then they thought, well, because they either did something versus nothing.

But I also would argue if you're going to go do a quick ten minutes of something, you're going to do it harder. So what if you decided right now, and this is how you would take this home? I'm going to start tracking how much I walk, my apple watch, my phone an oura ring. Whatever thing you choose, don't let that be a barrier. Yeah.

A
Most phones already have a pedometer. If you're going to keep it on you, you're going to be tracking your stuff. Figure out how to do this. There's a way to do it. Winners find ways, right?

B
So you're going to track. That's the first thing. Next thing is wherever you are, let's start to increase it every couple days by 10% until you're hitting 8000 as your bare minimum. And really your goal is much more around the 12,000. And so once you've got that dialed in, then there was a cool study that looked at people who were told to walk 12,000 steps a day.

And another group said, three times a week, make it a little harder. Three times. Three times a week, 30 minutes, just make it harder. That group lost waist circumference, body composition improved, their blood sugar improved. The other group didn't.

They saw a little improvement in their ldl, but this other group, and this was not in a lot of time, it was like eight weeks. Saw all of these other improvements, same amount of steps. All they did was add a little intensity. So what I have people do is, let's get the steps going, then let's add either hill speed or wrecking vest. I think wrecking vests are the greatest thing ever.

And then let's start adding in that resistance training, but let's do it in a microdosing type of way. So it could simply be, here I am sitting, and this is what I've designed with this person I'm working with is, okay, let's do ten air squats. That's a dose. Let's get some dumbbells and do ten overhead presses. That's a dose.

And these are all things that we could do wherever we are. You know, you could do body weight right against this table right now. You could do some push ups. You could do them against the floor if, you know, depending on someone's fitness level. I never want them to have a reason they couldn't do it.

So that's the first part. And yes, how I would have someone dose. This is, again, I start with just the steps. Then let's add the intensity. Then let's start adding in some resistance training dosing.

And if you can't do it all at once, say, three times a week of all this resistance training, think of getting my upper body pushing. I'm going to do it three times a week, but I might be doing, you know, it all throughout Monday. I might do a set of push ups, another set of push ups, another set of push ups. Maybe every fine doesn't matter. It's just getting it in that matters.

A
You know, this all goes back to your larger sort of idea that you want people to embrace, that you shared at the top of the interview, which is adding in, let's add in, let's add in these things. Let's add in the protein first. Let's add in these micro doses of exercise. Right. Let's add in these components because when you add in, you naturally start to crowd out the other behaviors that we all think we want to get away from.

But sometimes focusing on what I don't want to do is not always the most successful way to do it. It's add these in, right. And give yourself some little rewards when you do it. But there is this. I was listening to a video this morning that was talking about exercise resistance and how if you are not moving enough, getting that 8000 plus steps, and for this study it was 8600 steps, was sort of the place where it shifted that actually you were not able to burn fat well during exercise, that you became exercise resistant.

B
You weren't getting the results that you wanted. Even more saying that if you think that you can go to the gym a couple days a week and cross that off the list, you can't. But the reality is too, these are things that you can easily integrate into your life. Like I was going to walk here this morning, although I knew it would mess up my hair, but I'm going to walk back because I'm staying nearby. Your hair looks great, by the way.

So, you know, the beach fluff would not have worked. But I look at how do I incorporate this into what I'm doing, right? And then you can look at all throughout the day, how can I build more of this into my life? It's easy to do when you start to think about it and you do a little bit at a time so you don't feel like, oh my gosh, I don't have time. If you're listening right now, again, track your steps.

If you're at 5000, go to 6000 and get a walking pad at home or stand and pace when you're on the phone. That's what I do now. It's like if I'm in a meeting, I stand up and I move around. I'm not sitting the whole time. I'm always standing, pacing, walking.

How can I add more in if I've got a meeting I have to do and I can get them to do a walk with me. Bonus. I love it. You know, a few of these hacks you covered recently in a podcast episode you did. Your podcast is fantastic.

A
Everybody should check it out. And we're going to piggyback off that theme. And you might have some additional ones you want to add in. One of these topics that you talked about when it comes to adding in is the importance of hydration, especially when it comes to burning fat and supporting your metabolism. What do you want to say about hydration?

B
Have you had Rick Johnson on the show? Yeah. So, first of all, I have a big professional crush on Rick Johnson. He's awesome. He's the sweetest guy.

A
He wrote a book called nature wants us to be fat. Right? So when I was writing the sugar impact diet, he was my go to because he's all about fructose. But what he taught me about hydration really blew my mind. Now, we've always known water is one of the greatest hacks for weight loss.

B
First of all, it helps detoxify. Super important. Second of all, even mild dehydration can lower your metabolism. We know drinking water actually gives you a little bit of a metabolic boost. It's not.

It's not going to be huge, but everything counts. But what I didn't know, you know, we also know it's satiety. It's big for satiety, and especially if you're eating more fiber, really important to have more water. So detoxifying satiety, little bit of metabolic boost. If you are mildly dehydrated, it also can impact stress hormones, which could cause some belly fat.

But I finally learned the real mechanism when I heard this. I'm like, that is crazy. So what Rick told me was, when you are dehydrated, what happens is your body has, you have carbohydrates you've stored in your liver as glycogen. Now, when you eat fructose, some of the fructose that you eat, as we know, can get turned into glucose and stored as glycogen in the liver. But a lot of the times, if we eat too much fructose, it's very easily turned into fat.

And this is where we get elevated triglycerides, elevated liver fat. Right. It's why there's all of that hoopla about don't eat a bunch of high fructose corn syrup. But the reality is it's really things like agave and apple juice concentrate that create a lot of these problems. It's the unwrapped sugars.

What this has to do with dehydration is when you are mildly dehydrated, your body actually frees up the glycogen in your liver, converts it to fructose, which I didn't even know you could go back in the pathway. That way you can convert it back to fructose and turns it into fat. It's nuts. It's awful. Like, I was like, are you kidding me?

And that's the type of fat that's going to be now, this visceral adipose tissue. So that is just wild when you think about that. Just mild dehydration. And this is why I used to say, your body's not a bank account, it's a chemistry lab. Now I say it's a bank account, it's a chemistry lab, and it's a history book.

Here's how you can gain fat without changing any calories. Right. You know, you didn't eat anything, you didn't drink anything. You're dehydrated. Your body is now holding onto and storing fat so that if you were out in the desert, you could then burn that fat for fuel and liberate the water, just like a camel does.

Like a camel stores fat so that when it burns the fat, one of the byproducts of the fat burning is water. So that's why we're doing it. So that's why you don't want to be dehydrated. And we're not talking very dehydrated. This is mild dehydration in addition to fat.

A
I mean, mild dehydration. We'll link to a study that we covered in our newsletter previously. It makes you less alert, you feel less focused, you feel irritated. There's all sorts of consequences. So what's your general rule of thumb?

Obviously, people have different body sizes, shapes, genders, et cetera. How are you talking about appropriate levels of hydration for people? I think appropriate is probably half your weight and body and water ounces and then adding for exercise. So, like, every minute of exercise, another half ounce. So more than what people think.

B
And one of the ways to test is like, what's your pee look like now? If you just took B vitamins, it's going to be bright yellow. So that's not relevant. But for the most part, if you've got very concentrated urine problem. Right.

Um, and the other cool thing, we used to always say, oh, if you drink coffee, you have to drink twice as much water if you have to. Not the case. So everything counts. But obviously, the more you can do just some great, clean, pure water, the better. Amazing.

And you just took a sip of water right when I said that. Yeah. Need a little sip of water. Quick question on water. When are you using electrolytes?

A
They're so common these days. Obviously a lot of them taste amazing, so people use them all the time. Are they overusing them? What's your recommendation? I think if you're not exercising once a day.

B
If you're exercising probably twice a day and I'm assuming you're not doing heavy endurance, lots of sweat. It depends where you are. You know, I live in Florida, so I generally do two a day on my exercise days, but I'm careful with them because it's easy to overdo them. Great. Especially now that elements got sparkling.

I was like, oh, no. So I mean, we do, these aren't have as much as you want. What I do in the morning when I'm going to the gym is I will take electrolytes, creatine, and my essential amino acids and put them all in this massive 64 ouncer and I drink the whole thing. That's great. Yeah, similar to me.

A
I do the same thing. Okay, the next one is a little bit interesting, and it's probably the first one that we're going to talk about that goes to this idea of removal and it's super important specifically for people who are trying to burn fat and it's limiting alcohol. So it's the first one that we're not adding in necessarily. We're kind of taking away. But you focused on it.

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B
Well. Cause I had to. I mean, first of all, I drink wine. I know right now that's. That's not the popular opinion, but I do.

I don't drink it every single day, and I try to stick with dry farms. Shout out Todd and David. However, if you're trying to lose belly fat, alcohol is not gonna be helping you at all. So think about it. If you are drinking alcohol, your body now is going to metabolize that first, ahead of everything else.

And so you're not burning fat, you're metabolizing alcohol. Right. You're not burning sugar, you're metabolizing alcohol. So that's the first thing. And we know it causes you to lay down more visceral adipose tissue.

So that's where I take it out. If someone's working on losing belly fat, this isn't going to be your friend. Once you're close to where you want to be, I think you can cycle in some. No, if you're not drinking, this is not. Oh, go start drinking.

But if you're someone who loves red wine, I grew up outside of the wine country. I don't drink California wines anymore. Really, though? But if you're someone who loves red wine one or two days a week, I don't see it as an issue once you're where you want to be, but again, when you're working on getting there. I view this as I'm doing what I need to do to heal my metabolism, and I want to make my body really good at building muscle, burning off fat.

And if I throw alcohol into that, then it's focusing on burning alcohol, not burning fat. That's not helpful. It's a temporary distraction for your body. Right. When you're trying to achieve your goals, once you've achieved your goals.

Yeah. Or you're close, you know, and you're doing it one or two days a week, I don't see the issue. If you're someone. You cast bottles every day. That's a whole different story.

That's not what we're talking about. Yeah. You know, we talked about this idea, and you talked about this idea of being where you want to be. And before we go to the fifth hack that we have, which plays right into this, the thing that I want to chat about for a second is that a lot of people actually don't. They think they know where they want to be, but they don't have an accurate assessment of their body fat percentage.

A
They don't have an accurate assessment of their lean muscle mass. How do you recommend and what are your best tools that are out there for people to get a snapshot? And how important is it when you work with your clients? How important is it at the beginning that they know exactly where they stand so they can track where they want to be? I don't know how you do this without knowing that, like, the single most important thing.

B
In a perfect world, we would not have scales, we would only have body composition, because the scale has done so much emotional damage to people over the years. Now, I am 511 6ft tall and I've been lifting weight since I was 16. And I remember going in and wanting to become a model, right? And them telling me I needed to lose. Gosh, I'm trying to think of what it was.

It was either. It was like 20 pounds at least. And I look about like, what I look right now then, right. I was a little, not as muscular, but basically I was about the same. I can't lose 20 pounds.

It's not physically possible. I'd have to lose muscle in order to do it, and it messed me up completely. And I know I'm not, like, we have to know what our weight is made up of. And if we did that, if we used a scale, like as a biometric tool, rather than as a mean friend, right, and we really had all the information, it would shift so much. And then you'd also be able to see what's your best body composition for you?

Like, I've always been a super muscular person. I'm an adopted gal. When I met my birth mom, she had the same body type. That is our body type. I always wanted to be the curvy one.

I'm not the curvy one. I could try as hard as I wanted. If I gain weight, I just get wider. I don't get curvy. Doesn't happen.

So we all have to find that best body type for us and then monitor with body composition to make sure that we are holding onto our muscle. As we know, like, bone density is a lagging indicator of poor muscle mass, that we have quality muscle, because it's not just about having muscle. You don't want fat infiltrated muscle, you don't want to be a ribeye, you want to be a filet. And that our body fat is not dangerous. There's a huge difference between having body fat on your thighs and hips and having body fat around your viscera.

Right? So we want to make sure that we have body fat in the right places. So we can't tell that with a scale. And I can't tell you how many people dm me on Instagram saying, well, this isn't working. I go, but, you know, tell me what your body composition is.

They go, we haven't tested. I go, then I don't. How do you know? You don't know. You have no idea.

By just stepping on the scale what's happening here. You can't see under the hood. So we have to know our starting points. I mean, same with. Same with food.

If you're going to be making sure that you're getting the right amount of protein and you have to weigh it, how would you know? Even dietitians tend to underestimate what they eat by 25% if they're not doing it. How does the average person have any idea of eyeballing how much food that they're eating? Right. So in every one of these things doesn't mean you have to do it forever.

Although I think we should be managing body composition forever. We should do that. That should be something that's just part of your routine, and the research bears that out, that those people maintain their weight better. So let's talk about that. Good, better, best in terms of measuring your body composition, what's available to us in the tools that are out there for first us to get a baseline and then track our progress along the way.

So the very best is cost prohibitive, would be an MRI. So the best, I think, for what we have is Dexa. And, I mean, those are so easy to get now. And even if you just did it once a year, think about, like, this used to be something you only did for bone mineral density, and you didn't do it until you were in your late fifties, early sixties, to show that you had osteoporosis. So it's like, let's go see that the eggs are cracked.

It's so ridiculous. You can't uncrack them. So this is something that we should be doing in teens, when we can actually start to make a demonstrable difference in bone mineral density. So if we started doing this, let's say someone did this in their teens, and it was just part of the annual physical. Like, they did that.

They did a vo two max and some push up tests. Imagine how amazing this would be. And then ideally, once you hit 40 plus maybe every six months. But then what you can do is correlate it. So at home, you could get a bioimpedance scale.

So Dexa is going to be the best thing that you could do. Typically, you have to go to, like, a clinic or a doctor's office. There's a lot of centers, not as expensive. They're now under $100. A lot of doctors now have something called an in body scan.

And an in body is bioimpedance, which is based on total body water. And it sends a wave up your body and tests the resistance to it. And the resistance to it is how much body fat. It predicts body fat and predicts it in specific areas. So it's predictive based on total body water, which means that if your total body water is lower that day, you're dehydrated, you will look like you are fatter.

Right. You've got more body fat. If you're super hydrated, you'll look like you have less body fat, but your weight will go up. So this is where this is a little bit challenging, because we fluctuate, right? And this is why what I like to do is have someone have a bioimpedance scale at home.

They do their dexa. They come home, they check where they are at home for over a week. Every single day, they get that average, and they can correlate it. I know that my dexa reads me lower than my at home scale by a couple percentage points, right? But I can use my at home scale just to make sure that I'm staying where I want to be.

And what I think we should do is just have a bluetooth. You don't even have to look at it if this makes you nuts. But you just take the average over a week, because you cannot look at your weight every day and make any kind of intelligent decision because weight fluctuates. A couple, you know, can go up a couple pounds, down a little couple pounds based on what you ate. Right.

Or if you traveled. So we don't look at the daily to make a decision or beat ourselves up. We look at the average over a week, and then once a week, do. Do measurements as well. Do that waist and hip to look at it as well.

But what we're looking for is, am I losing body fat? And specifically body fat around my waist? Am I able to hold on to or build muscle? Those are the things we've got to look at and make the decisions based on. This goes into number five, your fifth hack that's there.

A
And it's often when people hear about it, there's a little bit of resistance. And I'm not talking about resistance training. There's a little bit of resistance because it feels like a tough or intimidating thing to do, and it's tracking. Talk to us about why tracking is so key, and then let's talk about how to do it to actually be successful long term to support body composition changes and burning belly fat. Right.

B
And I think with this tracking, I'm really talking about food tracking, although I really think we should be tracking food. Sleep, stress, movement, and body composition. That's a lot. Now, here's the thing. Don't have to track those all forever.

However, as you're learning about your body, these things are fantastic. So step one. Now, when we talk about tracking food, this doesn't mean you have to track your food forever. But I think as you're starting, you need to track your food for at least a month. And what I like to do is you've got to get a food scale.

They're $10. So this isn't something that's hard to do. It's even more important than the measuring. You've got away. So for one month, you start out, and the first thing I have people do is just get their protein optimized.

E protein first. And track and focus on that. We haven't changed anything else. All we're focusing on is tracking what you're eating and making sure you're getting the right amount of protein. Then I like to upgrade the plate and start to make sure you're getting in five or more servings of non starchy vegetables, a little bit of healthy fruit.

And then we'll start to look at fat. And if someone's looking, they go, okay, I want to actually drop some body fat and either recomp, lose, lose body fat, add muscle, or also lose some overall weight. Then we'll start to look at what we need to do to shift calories. But at least at that point, we've been tracking, and we know how much you're averagely eating a day. Like, I know what my average calories are to maintain my weight, right?

Because I've been doing it for so long, I know just where I need to hit what feels good. And some days I eat a little more, some days I eat a little less. It's fine. So that's the first place. And honestly, I hear so often people telling me, I'm stuck, nothing's happening, and then they'll do that and go, oh, oops, I thought I was eating a lot more protein than I was.

I didn't realize how many carbs I was eating. I mean, I think last time I told you the story of my husband, who was 25% body fat, and he was eating, like, half a bag of siete chips every night and a bunch of hummus, and I was like, why are we eating before we're eating? Like, this was pre dinner. Didn't make any sense, but that was great feedback for him. And then, of course, the next thing is to make sure you're tracking that body composition.

I think it's important, and the research is pretty clear that people who track their weight are better at maintaining their weight. I just want to make sure you're tracking your body composition because we don't want to maintain your weight. If you weigh the same at 50 that you did a 30, but you aren't actively doing resistance training, it's not the same weight. Right. You might be a size or two bigger at the same weight.

That was my husband was, you know, his waist size was two inches bigger. Same weight, totally different body composition. Because if we are not actively supporting and building our muscle mass as we age, we will lose it, as we know. And then the other part is tracking that sleep. And, man, if you.

I just read a study where they looked at short sleepers, four and a half hours. They. They took people down to four and a half hours of sleep versus eight and a half hours of sleep, and, you know, basically stopped their weight loss. Like, couldn't lose weight, couldn't build muscle. You've got to.

You basically really put blocks on muscle protein synthesis when you're not sleeping well. So sleep is critical and, of course, managing stress. Now, I don't start with all of this at once. You can't, you can't. You wouldn't do anything.

So when you really look at what you need to do, I think you've got to do a body composition to start with so you really know your starting point, but then pick the thing. Maybe the first thing for you is you go, you know, I've been sitting all the time. Your first things activity, start there. Focus on one thing, nail it. We had that discussion last time where I said it took me six months to get meditation under my belt.

Six months. I didn't focus on anything else. I just worked on that right now. I had been working on doing steps. Now that the steps are solidly being, you know, 1012 thousand a day, I'm working on really kicking up my HIIT training so I don't focus on improving multiple things at once.

Cause then I don't do anything. You focus one thing, one thing at a time. You know, the other beautiful thing about body composition? We had the oldest female ninja warrior on this podcast. I don't know if you've heard about her, but she would be great for your podcast.

A
Her name is Ginny McGonagall. How old is she? She is now 70. Mid seventies, I believe. Yeah, mid to late seventies.

And her story was fantastic. She went in for routine checkup with her doctors, and they suspected some osteopenia. That was their first step before full blown osteoporosis. And getting that, I don't think it was through a Dexa scan. I don't know exactly how they did it, but they found out that, yes, she did have osteopenia.

And again, if you do a Dexa scan, you're gonna get a sense you'll find it of your bone. Well, you'll get even better. Cause they probably did a foot scan to see if she had osteoporosis or osteopenia. But, like, full body Dexa's gonna show it. It's just amazing to me that a ninja warrior would have.

Well, this is before, so this is before she was a ninja warrior. Right. So that's the story. Okay, so she's just living her life. For her, being healthy was always about being skinny.

There was not muscle, which is the. Opposite, actually, of being healthy, when you think about it. Exactly. And we're gonna get to this concept, too. But she always thought of, you know, aging as, let's be graceful.

Instead of your idea of powerful. We're gonna come back to that. So her daughter. Her daughter, when she found out that her mom had these results, said, mom, you gotta get serious about changing your life around, and I'm gonna help you on that process. How old was she?

She was in her late sixties when she got started. Like, late sixties. This is so important for people to hear, because what is very clear is that it is never too late. It's never late. And then she got serious.

She started doing. First it was just walking more, then some lightweights, then some more bands, then that leading into full blown resistance training at the gym. Getting more protein in was one of the first things that she did. She got serious about this, and then she went back. Not even a year later.

I'll fact check this. We'll go back to the episode and see. But not even a year later, or about a year later. I know it was something like that. She had reversed her osteopenia, which you can do.

B
And that's a really. It's really fantastic. And that's why you've got to catch it. Yes, but I'm amazed she caught it, that, like, she catches it in her sixties and was able to do it. It's so huge.

A
And that's just another reminder for everybody here. Yes, you can change your life, and it's never too late, but it does get harder as you age, and you suffer that whole entire time. And that's the. Try to catch it early. Yeah.

B
All those years of not having the energy, of not feeling like you could do those things. And the key takeaway, what you talked about there was she just started and built. And I think that's one of the challenges I see that people do as they age, is they'll go, okay, I'm going to jump into this. Nope. That's why I say, let's change your fork.

Then let's get you moving. Then let's add some intensity to the movement. Now let's start some body movement. Like, let's just build and build and build, and you'll be blown away where you are in a year. But don't go like crazy rushing into some crossfit class.

A
Yeah, absolutely. You gotta sequentially build these steps up. Like you said, focus, nail that habit. Have it be a part of your life. Sure, there's gonna be ebbs and flows.

You might get off for a day or two, but then you get back on track. And now this thing becomes a part of your lifestyle. It's just who you are. I mean, you've been working out since you were 16, but fitness, these other habits that you have, it's just who you are. You can't imagine life differently.

B
And for the person that I'm working with right now, that has 200 pounds to lose. Used to be an athlete, a major athlete. And so what we've done is just bring them back. There I go. We have the picture.

We have them mentally there. And that's part of it, too, is like future pacing yourself to go, what are the things that I want to be able to do? Because I think for so many of us, and I did this, too, Drew, I'm kind of blown away. When I started to think about it, I'd had all these goals of what I wanted to be able to do at 50, and I didn't reset. I didn't think, okay, now what I want to be able to do at 60, at 70, at 80, and I just went on autopilot, and I was autopiloting everything.

And you're like, oh, this is good for me. You know, if you look around at everybody else, you're like, oh, I'm doing fine. Who wants to do fine? Like, don't you want to be the best version of yourself at every age? So you can't look around at what society is saying because then you're going to be average, and there's no reason to be average.

What they're showing us about aging now, like, there's, to me, two totally different schools of thought. And where I'm most concerned is that woman who's always tried to control her weight with diet, because what the research shows is those people tend to be tofi thin outside, fat inside, right. And that they will tend to have poor muscle mass. They'll have sarcopenic obesity, so they don't have enough muscle. And they're so used to controlling by just doing more cardio and eating less, they're just, you're devastating your metabolism, devastating it.

However, you can turn that all around by starting to move. Add the intensity, add the body, add all the resistance training and change it. And what's fun is rather than focusing on the scale you're focusing on, I used to be able to do one pull up. Now I can do six. I used to be able to do ten air squats.

Now I'm doing air squats with weights. Now I'm jumping at the end of my squat. So the feedback you're getting is really, what am I able to do? Which is the whole point of this anyway. It's not a number on a scale.

Why I worry about focus on body composition is I know that if I'm improving muscle and losing fat, it's meaning that I can do more everywhere. And you're becoming more point powerful. Right. Right. Do you want to just chat about that for a second?

A
The difference between power, aging powerfully, and this idea that we've had for so many years of aging gracefully, the messaging. That'S been given a little old lady. It's like, I'm never going to be a little old lady. Actually, I've never been little in my life, so the chance I'm going to be a little old lady is slim. But I think it is interesting because we're focused so much on muscle, and that's important.

B
But when you really look at what happens as we age, and again, I'm really unpacking right now how much of this is aging and how much of this is the habits that we get into as we age. And I'm starting to think it's a lot more of our behaviors than actual physiological aging. And so we lose muscle. But that isn't really what's scary here. And as you start to unpack it with muscle, we have two different types of skeletal muscle.

We have slow twitch, and those are all the things. Like right now, we're sitting up, our slow twitch muscle fibers are keeping us upright. If we're walking, if we're standing, those are all our slow twitch muscle fibers, our fast twitch muscle fibers, and they can get bigger. But the ones that really tend to do more of the hypertrophy are the fast twitch muscle fibers. So as I started to look at this, I want it must be that we're losing more fast, which is we age, which is clear as we age.

While we're losing muscle, what we're really losing is two to three times more strength. But what, the biggest thing we're losing is power. So muscle hypertrophy is your muscle size, and you want to think of that, but you also want to think of quality. Like, having a big muscle doesn't necessarily mean you're strong. A lot of those guys over there at gold's gym weren't that strong.

They just knew how to build muscle. Strength is how much you can move something one time, and it turns out to build strength, it's a little different than how you actually build muscle. There's crossover, but they're not the same. Power is how fast you can do something. And I think when we think of power, we also have to think of agility, because as we age, it's that ability to catch ourselves, move quickly, run up the stairs.

That's what we lose. But again, we don't have to. But I think we start to look at it, and you look at the adult exercise classes, and they are standing there with a chair and doing chair exercises. And I think that's not going to help us in life, sitting, doing our exercises in a chair, because in life, we have to get out of the chair. Yes, your knees might hurt, your back might hurt.

That's not the reason why you shouldn't do something. That's actually the reason why you should. I blew out my knee at 17, and they were like, you're going to have to have a knee replacement, but you want to put it off as long as possible, because these things only last, like, 20 years. And so I just strengthened everything around it, and I thought, all right, all the things they tell you couldn't do with a blown out knee squats. And lunges and stuff.

I did all of it. And I put off a knee replacement for, like, till I was 52. And I remember when I walked in, they go, we don't know how you're walking in here. Wow. I go, I've just kept everything super duper strong.

Again, think of your reason why not as probably your reason why, that we have to train to get better at life. And in life, we're going to have to get out of the way of something fast. We're going to have to pick something up off the floor, catch something, grab something, and so train for that in a controlled environment so that when you get out of that controlled environment, out into the wild, you don't get hurt. Such a powerful reminder and really a mindset shift. We don't want to be thinking about aging gracefully, especially for women.

A
Right. It's almost like it's a messaging of sort of like quieting, not being too loud. Don't be in sort of like, don't be a nuisance in the world. It's kind of, it's not intended to be that, but it kind of ends up being that this idea of, like, gracefully just fit into society. Stepping in the background.

No, you want to step into your power. Yes. Both for men and women, but especially for women who've been getting the opposite advice. Right. I mean, it's time to be the matriarchs here.

B
This came out of me starting to talk more about, okay, build muscle. I have been focused on muscle building since my early twenties as I started to work with clients. And everything was focused on cardio back then. This was in the eighties, everything was vegetarian, vegan, and cardio, lots and lots of cardio. And what I realized was it didn't work.

My clients were 45 plus and it wasn't working. And I went, well, they're not going to pay me to get worse, I'm pretty sure. So, and I discovered resistance training, and I was taking people to gold's gym, and I saw people in their sixties and seventies that were amazing. And I went, this is it. This is how you change everything.

If you have more muscle, you change your metabolism. If you're doing cardio, you have to keep doing it all the time. It's like you're making money and spending, living on paycheck to paycheck versus having a great bank account and you're just living off the interest. Having the great bank account is having a lot of muscle. Living paycheck to paycheck is just doing cardio.

So it's been really clear for a long time that this is the way to go. And I have been fighting this silliness for now, 40 years, and I cannot believe it's still out there, that when you talk about muscle, the biggest thing I hear is, I don't want to get big. And I'll tell you, I mean, for years I've been saying, hey, you know, do you know what it takes for a woman to put on one to two pounds of muscle a month? It is a fight. Even a man.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Unless you're like, 18 years old, 20 years old, even at my age of 40, turning 42 this year, even for men, that's very difficult. There's men who work out in the gym four days a week, eating the appropriate amount of protein. And even for them, it can be a tough thing to do.

Right. So you look at it and go lose up to 1% of your body weight. Body fat, body weight, really? A week, and putting on one to two pounds of muscle a month, that's like, herculean. And people are afraid they're going to get too big.

And the only time I've had a client get big is when they quit and decide to sit on the couch and eat. That's when you'll get big. Muscles, metabolic, spanx, it holds everything in tighter, boosts your metabolism. It's not going to make you bigger. And by the way, if you did say, oh, my gosh, I'm getting bigger, you could stop.

That would be it. But they'll say, I want your arms. I go, do you know what I do? Like, this is a lot of muscle. This is not toning.

Like this idea of toning. I'm just going to do 100 repetitions with a pink dumbbell. It's just silliness. But I realized hearing this over and over, I don't want to get big. I thought, you know what?

Get big. What if it's time for you to get big? Show up bigger in every part of your life. I remember early on working with a client, and she was getting so strong and so powerful, and her husband convinced her she had quit because it was threatening him. Wow.

Mm hmm. So you know how the way you do one thing is the way you do everything? I see working out, transferring to every part of your life. When you go to the gym and you work out, what you're doing is you're doing things that are hard and you're showing your body, see, I can do things that are hard and I can get stronger, and then that transfers into every other part of your life. That's why we need to go to the gym and we need to push it past what we're used to.

Because exercise really is doing more than what you're used to so your body can adjust. That's why I get. I got hate on Instagram for saying walking's not exercise, but unless you're very deconditioned, walking is like flossing. It's the things that we're supposed to be doing every day. Just like eating within a ten to twelve hour window is not intermittent fasting.

It's the way we should eat. And, like, you look at these things that we've now made things, and I go, walking is what we've always done. We just have made ourselves so comfortable. Like, I don't know if you ever read the comfort crisis. Yeah, yeah.

Michael Easter. So good. It's like, okay, so now we have the Zumba thing that's doing our vacuuming. We have, like, we just have removed everything out of our life that makes us have to move. This is way we should have been.

Like, that's just basic foundational move. That's what we should be doing. And by the way, I think as we age, we shouldn't be. I think they call it Boomer sizing your house, where you now move into a one story house. I think that as you age, you should have to move into a two or three story house.

And I think that the kitchen should be at the top and the bathroom should be at the bottom. Right. And so you have to go up and down all the time. I think one of the reasons my mom lived till 93 is that she lived in a two story house and did everything herself. Up and down, up and down, up and down.

A
I mean, it seems like that's one of the things that they're doing in the blue zones. They're at different levels of elevation and living next to hills, and they're constantly walking throughout the day. You know, two major things that you talked about, right? They don't have the little thing in the house to take them up and down the stairs, if they do have stairs, and then the remote controls and all this ridiculous stuff. But the bigger concept, again, is think about this as your time now to really step into your purpose, into your legacy, into playing a bigger game in life.

B
And you've got to have the body to be able to do it. You've got to have the energy to be able to do it. You've got to have the strength to be able to do it. So if you're having trouble getting in and out of a chair. Sitting in a chair to do exercise is not going to make that better.

A
You know, you mentioned about toning and all these myths that are there. You know, people say, how do I get JJ virgin arms? How do I get toned? Right? And you said, look, I'm doing resistance training.

I have my diet dialed in. I have these exercise micro doses throughout the day, these exercise snacks that are there, all the same things that you mentioned. I'm doing appropriate hydration, I'm eating protein, etcetera. It's not this idea that I'm just, you know, doing a thousand repetitions and that leads to toning. So I'm glad you addressed that.

Another question that we had from the last time that you were here is that people were worried about or are dealing with flabby skin, and especially women, their concern about, well, if I start to lose weight, am I going to have this flabby skin that's there? I can't tell you how often I've even heard from some of my mom's friends that are there, like, oh, you don't want to lose weight when you're older because it makes you look old. You have the weight sagging from your skin. You have the weight sagging from your belly. Just talk about that as a whole in any way you want to take it.

B
Huh, that is such an interesting one. Well, having worked with many morbidly obese people over the years, which my most favorite place to go is to work in with people who are not exercising, who have like to just take them and completely transform them. I love that. However, it is challenging with their skin. I know that a couple of the people we had on Doctor Phil that lost 100, 200 pounds ended up with a lot of loose skin, a lot of weight loss.

A
Morbidly obese. This is not what we're talking about. This is. We're talking about 30 pounds. It's amazing what your skin can do and how many cool things we have now, like collagen, that can help.

B
So to me, I look at those things and I go, I had a great mentor early on in life, and she said, when you hear something that sounds like an excuse, just put after it so I don't have to, oh, don't lose that weight because you're just going to end up with, like, loose skin. What? Really? If you told me that I could wave a magic wand with that person and they would have their body composition where they wanted to be with great energy and they were strong and they had a little bit of extra skin. They wouldn't want that.

A
They'd still go for it. Which is worse, being metabolically unhealthy or having a little extra skin? Now, there are some things you can do if you actually get through this and your body doesn't, you know, bodies are amazing what they can do. But if you do have a little extra skin, there are lasers and things like that that you can do. I know that.

B
Our buddy Dave Asprey, there's. I have a friend in Austin, he talks about this, so I can talk about this. Who does this process, process called Eli core that microcores your skin? Tim and I did it with our face, and it pulls everything in tighter. And he did it with his body because, you know, he was a 300 pound guy.

A
It's a laser and micro needling. What is it? It's this. It's even more than a micro needle. These are like these three needles.

B
They go and pull out thousands of cores and then your body tightens up. Was it painful? They anesthetize you. It's not pretty. Let's just say, okay, but I don't want a facelift.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Doctor Rob Whitfield. He's quite the ninja.

However, I think more than that, like, don't let what could be. This is the bigger idea. Don't let what could be or could happen. You know, I'm not going to go to the gym because I might get injured is right along that same type of thinking. I don't want to lose this weight because this might happen.

Instead. What about focusing of where do I want to be? What are the things that I want to be able to do this year, in five years, in ten years, in 20 years? And how do I have to live in order to be able to do those things? What type of career?

I don't know about you, but there's. Retirement is never on my horizon. It's like, what's the next thing I want to be able to do? So what skill sets do I need to do? How strong do I need to be able to do to do those things?

What are the things? Not what might happen if I do that. Someone might not like me or. Or I might have extra skin. You're moving towards something with having these goals, these aspirations of what you want to accomplish in life versus using the fear of something might happen in the future is you're running away from something, and that's not a good long term strategy to initiate change.

Right. And here's the thing. Sure. Would someone who's got higher body fat, have a little bit fuller, plumper face as they age. What is it?

Who was the, was it Katherine Hepburn who said, you either got to keep your face or your butt as you aged? Um, but, you know, like, I'd rather have a couple wrinkles and be fitter and be able to do more personally. But I think also part of that, too, is that people are losing weight, which is also, they're losing muscle. They're losing fat and muscle. But what happens when you start to also strengthen and grow the muscle you're adding to your lean body mass.

A
You don't have just typically, from what I've seen from the people in my life that have lost weight but have done it through strength training, eating protein, they don't have a lot of flabby skin, or if it is, it's a mild amount, and they're so happy. It's a badge of honor, and it's the tiniest little bit versus people who just lost. And I guess the most extreme version of this is when people only lose weight through Ozempic and they're just not eating. That's the only thing they're doing. You know, last time you came on, you said, hey, these GLP ones, these can be a tool in the toolbox to get people kick started, and there's a right way to do it, distance training, protein, et cetera.

But a lot of people are not doing that. They're just essentially having that satiety signal, not eating, but then they're not maintaining that muscle mass. So that is where you see some of that more extreme skin issue or hollowing of the face. What would have happened if they would have been training, that whole. Exactly.

B
Which applies to any diet, by the way. So any diet, if you look at the average diet, 25% to 40% of what you lose is muscle. Frightening. Any diet, you should never, ever go on caloric restriction without eating optimal protein. If anything, going a little higher in protein and doing resistance training, it shouldn't be allowed.

It shouldn't be, because you're going to damage your metabolism further. And again, the thought processes, don't lose weight to get healthy, get metabolically healthy to lose weight. It's such a different way to approach things, and it comes from such a place of, like, loving yourself instead of like this. I've got to lose weight, right? That's just this horrible thing.

So the ozembic thing, again, I always look at this and go, it's not the Ozempic that's causing the muscle loss. It's the poorly designed diet. What I think is interesting with ozembic, with any of the GLp ones, is, if you look at this, the question is, why are these working so well? And when you look at glp one, if you are obese, have fatty liver disease, which 25% of the population now is fatty liver disease, that's crazy. Crazy, non alcoholic fatty liver disease.

But if you're insulin resistant, obese, or have fatty liver disease, you will be glp one deficient. So to me, the whole question is, why is this working so well? Oh, it's working so well because we're glp one deficient. If this could help us get back to that point, and we can start to use things that help improve glp one, like exercise, protein, fiber, right? Then we can cross over and get through it, use it where it's needed, and then get our body to be able to do what it needs to do.

But when you're really weight loss resistant, insulin resistant, exercise resistant, sometimes you need the things to help you get there. And it's worse to be metabolically unhealthy. I forgot the gentleman's last name, but his first name is Jonathan, and he wrote a book called Miracle Drug. Have you seen this? He's kind of been making the rounds, and it's all about Ozempic.

A
And he, as a writer, was obese. In the book, he even talks about meeting the Dalai Lama one time and getting fat shamed by the Dalai Lama. Wow. Which was a whole. I would not have expected that.

I think he was asking some very tough questions about some of the beliefs of the Dalai Lama or things that he had heard. He was doing a little bit of a journalistic gotcha situation, and he is a journalist, so he was asking tough questions. It's his job. And the Dalai Lama started to take the conversation a different way and ended up fat shaming him. I won't get into that, but he talks about it in the book.

Anyways, the reason that I brought his name up is that he's talking about his journey of taking these drugs and having this sort of push and pull experience. On the one hand, you know, they worked incredibly and helped him, for the first time, have sustained weight loss. He's been on more diets than any person that he knows that are out there constantly going up and down and other things. But then on the other side, him asking really tough questions of, well, now they're talking about having kids on this from 8910 and then for the rest of their life. Because once you stop being on these drugs unless if you're working with an individual like yourself or a lot of people that are in our circles who are really temporarily using them, if they're gonna use them, and then get you off of it, to have a sustained life approach.

So one of the coolest sections in the book is he talks about Japan. And I wanna bring this up because I wanna go back to this idea of tracking. So first I'll tell you the story, and then I'll talk about the question, get your kind of thoughts on it. So it was either, like, 2004 or 2008. Japan had a national freakout because their obesity rate in the country went from, like, 3.5% to 4%.

Right? So just as a contrast, in America, our obesity rates are like 30%. And then you add up 30, 40%. And then you add, I say, I. Think it's now 40.

Yeah. So it's like 40%. Then you had people who are obese and overweight, and it's more than 50%. So Japan, they had a national emergency freak out, like, in their congress, politicians, business owners. It was a big, big thing of, holy shit, what the f.

Is happening? Cause they went up, like, not even a full percentage point. So they said, we need to do something about this. So one of the things that they did is, first, they started with children, because we know that the habits that you have at a young age set the tone for the rest of your life. So they said, number one, all processed food is banned in school.

All processed food. No processed food at all. Every school has to have a full time nutritionist. And that nutritionist is responsible of working with the culinary team to design from scratch meals every day that meet the appropriate levels of carbs, fat, and protein. Micronutrients, you know, they eat all sorts of cool and crazy things.

B
I know. I live in Japan, right? They're eating seaweed and these different fish things. And every day, kids eat fresh food at school. In some of the youngest schools, kids actually will even help out and prepare, like, more symbolically.

A
You know, they're not like, cooking over a stove, but they'll help prepare. They'll wash vegetables, they'll chop things. And they're teaching these kids these lifestyles that are part of it. So that was one thing they did now for adults, and this is something that is very controversial and probably would not work in the land of the free and home of the brave here in America. But it was a big part of their process of what helped them for adults, for companies of a certain size basically, anybody that works in kind of like corporate Japan, like we have corporate America.

Employers were mandated to track an employee's weight. Employers were mandated to track an employee's weight and give them, more importantly, tools and resources to have a nutritionist on staff and to have people that would intervene when they saw that things were heading in the wrong direction to be able to support them. And the controversial thing about it, we can look at that from a sense of America of, you know, people, you know, do we really want, if we're working at Coca Cola, do we want them tracking and being responsible for. For our weight and our health? But in Japan, there's this sort of national identity where a lot of the employees that were surveyed in these national surveys were like, you know what?

I'm so thankful that my employer cares enough, because if they weren't tracking and letting me know, I would have just easily ate too much, got fat, wasn't exercising. It's not just about eating. It's about movement. It's about other things. And I'm thankful that they're putting in these resources and providing the tools that were there.

So I don't think that would fly here in the states. But it's just interesting as a concept that the country that has, probably the most modern country that has the lowest level of obesity had to take such drastic measures to actually support children and adults because our processed food system is just so addictive. And most people that are out there, they're not listening to a podcast, they're not necessarily watching our YouTube videos together, and they need some sort of system. Now, I'm not saying it's the japanese system, but it does go back to this idea of over there, the government might be involved and companies you work for, but tracking and paying attention things works. And because we're not going to do that anytime soon on a national level, we got to do it ourselves.

Any thoughts about that? Oh, there's so many thoughts. You know, I think I told you I was in solidarity, South Korea this summer, and both the hotels I went to, the gyms were insane. And everyone was clearly, these were gyms that weren't just like, it was a JW Marriott, and it was also this major gym, and everyone was in PE clubs, and they were aged, like, 40 to 80. And the whole time we're in Seoul, I never saw one person who was overweight.

B
Tim saw one because I was like, there's no one even overweight. And forget obese. No one's overweight. And the gyms have people that are in their seventies and eighties in PE clothes, which I thought was like, look at this, they're in pE clothes. Which was amazing to me.

But I think back to when I was on Doctor Phil, because we decided that we were going to tackle teenage obesity. What a nightmare this was. First of all, we tried to take over a school in Texas. But you know what the problem is, is that the big food has all the contracts with the schools. Yeah.

So you can't change anything.

It's very, very problematic. Then we tried to just help some teens in LA, but the problem was the parents. You had to fix the. It's like, what do you do? So the parents were eating unhealthy, right?

And so now we had, the kids were trying to eat healthy, but the parents weren't eating healthy. So we're trying to help. Help the kids eat. It was, it's a really, it's like chicken, egg. What the heck do you do here to fix this thing?

And then you look and go, okay, kids on ozembic, I mean, obviously the step one is, could we somehow get kids eating healthier and learning how to cook in schools? I think when you had the pandemic, you realized people don't know how to cook. I was telling a story. My son, I remember one of my friends was like, you need to watch what your kid is watching on YouTube because he's probably watching porn. And I go, my kid is not watching porn.

Turns out my kid was watching cooking videos, you know, and he is, he loves to cook. But we've got to be able to have healthy food at home that our kids can then cook, that they learn how to cook. And what would happen if we actually did those types of things in school? You look at the stuff we learned in school and like, how does that really change your life? If you learned in school how to, how to, like, manage your finances and do exercise and sleep well and have great relationships and cook, everything would be different.

But those are none of the skills that we have at all. So it's a hard one because you go, where does this start? How do we fix this? Are we so far down the path now that there's no way to fix this? When you look at what's going on in the supermarkets, like, I was at the gym at the hotel yesterday, and the hotel gym had these commercials going.

One was for Skittles. No, it was Starburst. One was for Papa John's. And it was just went on and on and on, you know, little football game, and then food, food, food, food. And I was like, holy smokes.

This is what people are seeing every day. How do we unwind this? I don't know. And then you look at and go, okay, you've got a kid. Obviously you want the kid eating healthy.

You want the kids sleeping, eating healthy, having something for stress management and exercising. But if they go home and the family's not eating healthy, how's this going to work? And if they're an overweight child, the risk they'll be an overweight adult, 70%. If they're put on this drug, nothing. If nothing else works, they've tried everything else, which I don't know how to do.

If they've got a family situation the way they have it. So what do we do? Do healthy boarding schools? I don't know what to do here. Right.

But if you've got a kid who. They've actually put them on everything, but they've now got such a damaged metabolism, they can't lose weight. They would be on polypharmacy the rest of their life. So then the question is, which is worse? And I'm just.

I don't know. Like, don't shoot the messenger. Like, I just want people to be healthy. But if you're. If you are a child who now is on diabetes meds, maybe, like, blood pressure medication and a statin, and you're staying obese versus you get on this medication and you actually have to be on it for life, but you won't be obese, but you also won't have to be on all those other medications, which is worse.

A
Yeah. I think it's an important conversation, and I'd love to see a lot more debates about it. And I think that individuals that I'm friends with, like Callie means. Right. He's.

B
Well, he's so far over this way, it's like, I think he's just fantastic. I'm like, but, Callie, look at it both sides. No one wants a kid to have to be on these things, and no one wants a kid to be obese, and no one wants a kid to be set up to be obese the whole rest of their life. Obviously, the first step is, how do we help them with, like, why did we cut pa out of schools? You know, couldn't the schools be the first place we learn how to eat healthy and live healthy?

Shouldn't all of that be in the schools? But you have big food controlling it. Yeah. Which is one thing I really appreciate that he's bringing in is that almost in that way, the way that Japan freaked the out when it went up, not even a full percentage point of obesity. He's like, our situation is way worse, which we all agree on.

A
We need a national level freakout. We do, but you've got the wrong money controlling it. Yeah, I mean, that's the, like, you look at it, and you've got big food money controlling this. That's. It's a big challenge.

B
And he is shining the light on this, and I'm so grateful for that. And if there is a situation with adults, like, I look at it and go, if semaglutide, if one of these peptides could help you get off all your other medications, but you had to stay on it for life, but you would never have to be on those other medications, you're probably better off. So we have to always risk, reward all of these things and not look at it emotionally. But the kid thing kills me, because I remember back in school, we had one kid who was a little overweight, teased relentlessly. It's the only kid I can remember who was overweight.

You didn't have obese kids. That's not natural or normal, right. Yeah. And, you know, and we also. So we had one day a week where we got, like, a hostess cupcake and a hot dog.

The rest of the time, everybody had their lunch, and they were, you know, wasn't ultra processed food stuff. There's this nonprofit that's based in the Bay Area. I'm blanking on the name, but the founder's name is Nora. And they go into schools, and they actually work with schools to, like, convert and set up their kitchen, and they help parents sort of, like, create advocacy. And they're mostly in the Bay Area, not just in high economic areas.

A
They've worked with some more impoverished schools, schools that are more in poverty stricken areas. And one of the biggest things that they were saying, and Robert Lustig is an advisor and a few other people that are there, one of the things that they were saying, I think it's called the real Schools project. Anyways, we'll link to it in the show notes. They were saying that these schools have been so co opted by big food that when they go in, the school actually has the will and the principals on board, and the families, like, enough people are there that want us support this. One of the biggest challenges, they actually don't even have the real estate in the school because they've outsourced everything.

There's not even a place in the school to make food. And so they're dealing with even just the most foundational aspects of. There's not the section to make food. There's not enough burners, there's not enough kitchen, because it's all been brought in by Cisco and these other big foods. They've got the contract.

B
So there's nothing you can do. That was the big thing we discovered in Texas. Like, they have the contracts. There's nothing you can do. It's absolutely.

A
Well, I will say this year, not to get too down the political rabbit hole. I've never seen more conversation. Right. I've never seen more conversation on both sides of the aisle. And independents, I've never seen more republicans, democrats, and independents.

It's still the minority of individuals that are out there, but that are talking about chronic disease and especially kids. And I think that a lot of society, like, if I surveyed my audience, it's gonna be the full spectrum of things. You know, when I was growing up and getting into health, it was mostly like, if you were into health, and I'm not even that old. I'm 42. It was kind of like crunchy granola.

B
You were a health. Come on. I've been a health freak my whole life. I grew up in Berkeley. Yeah.

I went to health food stores. Everything was carabin granola and. Yeah, right. Same thing. Oh, my God.

A
Filtered water. You're a weirdo. Right, right. And it's always in, like, a university town and the co ops, you know, and you'd find sort of like anti establishment sort of magazines and other stuff. You couldn't even really find a lot of health food books.

This is before Amazon. They would be at these natural food stores. Right, right. But now society has been red pilled. Right.

And again, not to make this about politics, but if people do identify as Democrat, Republican, independent, something else in between every side of the aisle, people are waking up and realizing, like, this is an important issue, and I'm gonna vote with my dollars. And I hope that this episode here also helps people understand that, yes, we need to vote with our dollars, but first and foremost, we can't control everything. But be an example yourself. Be an example yourself. Follow some of these action items.

Follow these steps that are there. And then if you can support your family, but you can't support your family before you become an example yourself. And now we can deal with these bigger issues that are there, too, because if you're not an example, people are not going to pay attention to you. Here's the reality. And I think of Brian Johnson, who, when you look at all the money he spends, this $2 million a year for this longevity.

B
The end game is, he goes, the things that really move the needle are free. And if you look at all the change that has to happen, it's the Mahatma Gandhi be the change you want to see in the world. The reality is, if all you did was start moving more and you improved your diet, which, by the way, doesn't have to cost a lot of money, it's way easier now with all of the. I mean, Costco's got organic food, so you improve your diet, you get moving, you focus on your sleep, you drink pure water. A lot of these things are not the costly things.

They're not the entitled, privileged things. They're free or not much, right? It's a lateral shift. If we did that, no one would buy big food. Big food wouldn't be there.

If we did that stuff, we wouldn't really need the big pharma because we'd improve our whole metabolic health, right? We wouldn't be using insurance for anything but catastrophic. So we actually have a lot of power in the day to day decisions that we do would change everything. But I think you get to such a point where you're so overwhelmed with your health that it feels daunting. And that's why I always say, let's just start.

Start with, could we just eat more protein? Could we just move more? Could we just focus on drinking more? Like just one at a time, step by step. Everything builds on self.

And if you're tracking, you start to see these little improvements, because some of it could be like watching grass grow. You try to put on muscle, it's like watching grass grow. Let's. That's why you. Just.

Little improvements. I used to be able to do push ups on my knees. Now I can get on my toes. I used to huff and puff, getting up the stairs. Now I can go up and down, up, and like, every little thing matters.

And all of a sudden we'd look and go, what happened to big food? No one's supporting them. But it could be that grass roots, because a lot of this stuff really isn't. It's not expensive and it's really not time consuming. It just takes a little bit of a mindset shift to get into it.

A
So, on that note, let's pull on some threads of some more practical aspects related to some of the things we covered in the beginning. So on the tracking side, what is your recommendation for people, especially because one of the first things you want people to do is increase and eat their protein first. Right? Audit their protein eat their protein first. Most people are not consuming enough protein.

How are you recommending for your clients and the people that follow you of tracking that throughout the day? I like the chronometer app. It's free. That's what I use. Like these things, there's so many of these things that are free, you know, and everyone pretty much has a phone nowadays.

B
So chronometer app and a food scale, not free, $10. Use that. You won't need to do this forever. But it is such an eye opener. So that's the first thing.

And I find that even if you didn't make any recommendations, was beyond just eat protein first and get enough that people improve their diet. And that's actually what the research shows. People who eat protein first make better food choices overall. Now, obviously, next step for me is upgrading your plate with more non starchy vegetables, a little bit of fruit. But that's the one chronometer, super easy, easy to do.

A
And for people that are just not familiar with this, again, this is an app. You can get it on all the different phones that are on there. It's on the app store, on the Google Android store. Whatever other kind of phone you use, you're going to download it. They'll ask you some basic questions to set up your profile, your gender, your weight, your height, etcetera.

If you know your target calories. If you don't, that's okay. You can kind of skip it. And then you can start by entering things in. And a lot of the things that we all consume on a repetitive basis, like people are pretty much eating the same diet on a regular basis.

When you scan the barcode of those things, a lot of them are already built into the daily. And hopefully you're not using barcodes that much. Right? But if you have like a protein sugar, it does. I'm getting a little teasing, but, you know, your greek style yogurt has a barcode, so it's very easy because then you just favorite the things you eat every day.

B
Like I've got my blueberries and my blackberries and my chicken breast and all those things that are just common for me are just in there, right? But the key is like, let's say greek yogurt, right? You're going to have a serving of that. In the beginning, you got to weigh it. So you put your bowl on the food, you zero out the scale, and now you're adding what you think is a serving.

A
But then you look at the scale to make sure it's actually a serving. Because if you're eating more than a serving, unless you're intending to eat more than a serving, you got to make sure you appropriately track that inside of there. So you're going to write in there, how much did you actually consume? And as somebody who, years ago, when I did this for the first time, I was even blown away by how many things I did not have the correct understanding of. Especially there's a lot of really great tasting things that have higher amounts of fat calories.

And when I was going through a cut phase of working with my trainer, I didn't realize that my single pour of primal kitchen salad dressing, which I. Love, was like, four servings, was like. Two and a half servings, right? I'm working on this right now with a friend, and he's just. He's just shocked, right?

Because for years he said, you know, I just don't think this is working. I think that the type of training that I'm doing is making me. Making me gain weight. I need to do more of this type of training that's there. And I was like, let's actually together for just a couple days.

I'm not training this. I don't know this, but I did this myself. Let me help you. Let's actually track your calories. I'll support you.

I'll check in with you. If you don't have a food scale that day or traveling, text me. I'll just kind of get a general idea. I'll help you enter into the app. And he was blown away.

He was consuming 30% more calories each day than what he thought he was consuming. And that is completely typical. It's, again, we underestimate. And that includes, like, dietitians, what we eat by anywhere from 25% to 40%. It's completely typical.

B
And it is. You see, it's the fat. It's the. It's the fat that's so easy to add up. And I think I look at all diets as tools, right?

Whether it's keto, carnivore, vegan, they all can be actually helpful. Maybe not for the long term, for the short term. But I think somehow it seems like every couple years, something gets the green light and something gets the red light. And keto made us all think, oh, you can eat as much fat as you want. No, you cannot.

You cannot. It will add up. And if you. Too many calories, too much healthy food, even if it's olive oil, is unhealthy and it's got to go somewhere. And fat, if you're eating too much fat, it's going to be stored as fat.

Super easy. Doesn't take anything for your body to incorporate it in as fat. So one of the easiest things to do is to really start to monitor that, because for a lot of people listening, they probably have already been careful with their sugar and their refined carbohydrates, but it's really easy to overload it on things like olive oil. It's so true. True.

A
You know, one of your most popular reels that you did recently, and this would be a great thing to end on because people love the visual they get, the understanding they're trying to imagine you went through, and you said, how I get 100 plus grams of protein, whatever your target amount is. What's your target amount in your case, you try to hit every day? I will tell you, I eat a lot of protein, so I weigh 142, and I generally target about 150 grams of protein, but I often get 180 grams of protein. But I've always been that person who feels better eating more protein. Totally.

B
So it just is the way my diet is. Yeah. And people hear those numbers. When I heard those numbers when my trainer said, I want you to eat 165 grams of protein every day. And that's what I'm shooting for initially, especially somebody who grew up vegetarian.

A
I'm not vegetarian now, and I haven't been since I was in my early twenties. I'm like, oh, oh, okay. Well, as a vegetarian, I mean, you'd be eating so many calories to get there unless you're using. But I think protein powders are such a great tool. No, they're super helpful, especially for a vegetarian or vegan.

So walk us through your daily routine. Right. You talked a little bit about your morning. Just recap that a little bit. Give us a showcase of how are you getting that much protein.

I think it's super helpful, especially for a lot of the women. Again, not to make this about men or women, but I most often hear, and most of the questions that I see on YouTube and that are emailed in is often from women who are saying, I just cannot imagine eating that much protein. So you do it. Show us how you do it. Yeah, and it's not that hard.

B
So I'm traveling right now at home. I'll do a smoothie. It's easy. If I'm traveling, it's either an egg and egg white omelet or it is a. And literally, I'll be like, give me two to three eggs, six egg whites.

So normally they'll have an egg white omelet. On the menu. And I say, just add two eggs to that fat, and they're like, huh? Right. But I know that if I'm getting two eggs, that's.

That's 12 grams of protein. And if I've got six egg whites, that's gonna be another, like, 18. So right there, I've got 30 grams, and I sprinkle in something, like some feta. So that's an easy one for me to do. And generally, I have, like, two pieces of bacon with it.

Um, if the other thing we like to do when we travel is we will get yogurts. And I travel with, I have a bone broth, collagen protein. So it's got a lot of collagen, some protein in there. And I will stir in two scoops of that into greek style yogurt, and I'll basically do a double serving of greek style yogurt. And that sometimes.

Here's my guilty one that I love. It's a total processed food, but it's not a crappy one. And I think we have to be able to look at processed food. Like, you know, protein powders are processed, but if you're eating good ones, they're not crappy. So I will take greek yogurt.

I'll take the. My bone broth protein powder. Put those together. I've got right there, like, 40 plus grams of protein. And then I'll use a little of the cereal called Catalina crunch.

A
Yeah. Which is basically fiber and protein. So I'll get up to 50 grams right there. And then lunch is always some kind of protein. So today we're ordering from goop kitchen, and I did a double chicken chinese chicken salad.

B
So I'll get, like, eight or 9oz of chicken right there. And then we're going out to dinner with friends who know they're cooking dinner at the house, and they basically no wheat protein and vegetables. So, you know, I'll eat anywhere from six to 10oz of protein at each meal. Yeah, with a lot of vegetables. And then I eat, you know, lunch is usually vegetables with some protein and some berries, and dinner is vegetables with some protein, maybe berries sometimes.

A
Yeah. Or a glass of wine. Well, the reason that I appreciate you breaking it down is that when you actually hear it, it's not crazy. It's just unfamiliar for a lot of people. So everything that you said is something that everybody listening would eat.

B
Yeah. Like, you could totally order. Look at it. Look at it. Like, I look at most salads.

And the way that people eat a salad, they turned basically a salad into a sundae. They got a bunch of lettuce, no calories. Then they got, like, some glazed nuts, sugar and fat. Then they got some kind of, like, salad dressing that's got either crappy oils or sugar or both. Usually both in it.

And then maybe there's a little bit of protein. Always double the protein. That's the answer. Always get a dressing on the side and find out. That's why, like, the places like, oh, God, you had the guy on the show.

A
Sweet green. Sweet green. Yeah. You know, the places where, you know, they're good and doing good dressings. If not, get straight olive oil.

B
We actually now travel with little extra virgin olive oil packets and our sea salt. I'm like, we are so high maintenance. But, you know, you just double up your protein. It's so easy. That's the hack, right?

That is the hack. And last night we ordered from this tacoa mexican place. Cause I know they have cauliflower, rice, and I could double up the. I had grass fed carne asada and shrimp with it, and then a lot of double vegetables. Easy.

And we travel all the time, so I'd say it's even easier because I always go, okay, what do they have that's grass fed or pastured or wild? I'll get that. I always get dressings on the side. That's where you get in trouble. And then I always see what kind of vegetables they have and how they've been prepared, because assume they've been prepared in some crappy thing, unless they're steamed.

A
Yeah, totally sweet greens is amazing. Takaya is amazing. True food kitchen. Yes. They also stopped using seed oils.

B
We have. Everything is sourced super high quality. Love those guys. JJ, this has been amazing. It's been amazing because not only did you come in and give the super practical, no cost tip, everything you mentioned in the beginning, completely free.

A
Completely free, right. Minus the food that you have to purchase, which you're already doing anyway. And a lot of times, protein is going to be cheaper in the long run. So everything free that you can do to dial in your body composition, accelerate fat burning, not just weight loss, and to appropriately track, audit and make progress along the way. Because you're reminding us that this is a mindset shift.

We've been all brainwashed. We've been taught all these myths, we've been taught all these things that are incorrect for years. So this is stepping into a new way of looking at things and primarily doing it by a strategy that works long term, which is adding in first right. And habit stacking, you've all heard about habit stacking. It's, you know, you want all this to change.

B
And it's remarkable how much your body can shift in a year. Like, I look at Tim, my husband, who went from 25% to 10% body fat, lost three pounds, lost 27 pounds of fat, put on 24 pounds of muscle. Entirely different. Like, better shape he's ever been in his entire life. And that was over the course of, I think, ten months, not over the course of a month, the first month, like very little, you know, little shifts.

Right. But it's just, you just stack on it and you really monitor, you know, am I getting stronger? How's my energy? Monitor all of those things. Don't let the scale without body composition be your judge because you're not going to get the information from that.

Like, look at Tim. He would have said, oh, I lost three pounds. I worked for a year. I lost three pounds. Right, right.

A
There's way more of the story. Oh, yeah, talk about your world. How can people continue this conversation with you? You have a fantastic podcast. Tell us about that and then some other things you're up to.

B
So I have well beyond 40, which is focused on really 50, 60, 70. How are you going? What do you need to do on a regular basis to age powerfully? I have my eat protein first challenge, which is a free challenge@jjvirgin.com. proteinfirst what I'm really focusing on is giving people super actionable stuff that they can do.

So the YouTube channel, now I'm starting to do a lot more exercise in there. I always was like, I'm not going to do that. I did that 3rd 30 years ago, but I realized that, you know, a 60 year old woman probably doesn't want to do exercise with a 25 year old in booty shorts. I wouldn't personally. So I'm really trying to put those things in on, like, I've got one in there on how to start a resistance training program because I think it's really important for us to look at this and go, I want to train to be better at life.

Yeah, how. So how do I need to do it? And then now I'm working on like, what do we need to do for high intensity arable training, which is we didn't even talk about that. So important as we age to be putting things in, like, you know, fast, explosive movement and jumping and agility and things that really get our heart rate up high. So those are the things that I'm putting onto YouTube.

So that you really take out the excuse of I don't want to go to the gym or I don't have the money or because it's all there. Yeah, it's all there. Amazing. And you have some great products and books and other things. They're all on your website, if you wouldn't mind mentioning it.

So that's JJ, virgin.com. and I'm glad you mentioned the thing. So much of the biggest needle movers for our health are free. Yes. Right.

They're not easy. And you don't want them to be easy. You actually want them to be hard because then you get stronger and then everything feels easier. It's so true. Well, we all need that reminder, and I want to thank you for giving us that reminder today.

A
We'll link to everything that you're up to in the show notes. And I really hope my audience continues to follow you on your podcast. JJ, on behalf of everybody who benefited from all your appearances on this podcast, including myself, my family, my sisters are huge fans of yours. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming back on.

B
Thank you. I appreciate it.

A
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.

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