[00:00:01] Luke: JJ Virgin, I have an Evernote document from 2016 where I wrote out my top 50 podcast guests, and I realized recently that you're on that list.

[00:00:16] JJ: No kidding.

[00:00:16] Luke: It's taken eight years. Yeah. Because when I started tapping into-- well, of course, there were spiritual teachers that I'd been following for some time. And then there were a lot of people in the health space, alternative medicine, biohacking, all that stuff. And yeah, you were on that list. And we've crossed paths at many events over the years and I'm like, oh, there she goes.

[00:00:36] She's gone. Yeah. And then we finally met recently at a small event here in Austin. So I was like, all right, I think it's about to happen. So give me your truncated origin story. I know you as one of the most prominent leaders in the health and fitness space, and you've been at it for quite a while. How did you first enter into this area of expertise?

[00:01:02] JJ: So I wanted to be a theater actress. I grew up in San Francisco. I'm adopted. I was convinced that my birth mother was Barbra Streisand. You can totally see this resemblance. I was like, crazy.

[00:01:16] I went to American Conservatory Theater, and I was in dance classes and voice lessons, although my voice teacher was like, I don't think there's a lot of hope here. However, it was great for speaking later. And at 17, I was very into diet because I saw my body totally as this instrument. I was dancing. I was a tap dancer ballet. I did tap ballet, gymnastics, and I lifted weights with the high school football team.

[00:01:46] And all of this stuff I was doing, at 17 I blew out my knee, a bad blowout. And went off to college as a theater major at UCLA, and then I blew it out again. And this time I had to go get major surgery, and it got me very interested in fitness and nutrition at a whole other level. And so by the time I graduated from UCLA, I started teaching aerobics in Westwood, California.

[00:02:16] And someone called up the aerobic studio and wanted someone to come to their house to teach them aerobics. Personal training was born. I had this running joke with Mark Sisson, because as far as we can tell, it was us and Tony Horton and Body by Jake.

[00:02:30] Luke: That's funny. I remember Tony Horton.

[00:02:31] JJ: Personal trainers. There wasn't even a name. I remember going to get a business license when I moved to Florida as a personal trainer and they told me I couldn't do that. I think they thought I was a prostitute. I was going, no, no, no, this is not what I'm doing-- I promise. So it just was something, by the time I graduated UCLA, I'd switched out of the theater department. And I graduated and I had a full-blown personal training business.

[00:02:58] And everybody else was going off to get a job and they were buying suits, and I thought, God, how horrible. I don't want to do that. And so I went off to grad school in exercise science, and now I've just been at it ever since. I'm obsessed with two things really in life, and one of them is everything health. And really specifically, I've always been into exercise science and nutrition. And then the other one is business and marketing. Those are my two big fascinations.

[00:03:31] Luke: You're widely known for both. What's this mastermind you have? I've seen it over the years, and I know you roll with some of the big players in the health and wellness game. What is that?

[00:03:44] JJ: How did that happen?

[00:03:46] Luke: Yeah. I've never really explored deeply and read everything on the website and things like that, but I know that that's a huge part of your personal life and brand, are these masterminds and helping entrepreneurs and things like that. But I don't know much about it.

[00:04:01] JJ: So for years I've always had my own business. I actually had one job, and I got fired in three months.

[00:04:09] Luke: Good for you.

[00:04:10] JJ: I know. Very good. Well, it would've been better, but at the time I had a six-month-old and a year-and-a-half-old and a husband who I discovered really didn't want to do his job, which he was a medical malpractice trial attorney.

[00:04:25] He didn't want to do that. He'd never wanted to do that. His whole family was either medical malpractice trial attorneys or doctors. And so he had to choose basically. And so he half-heartedly went to law school, and that's what he became. But he always wanted to be a professional tennis player. So I discovered that he doesn't want to do this anymore when we are pregnant with the first baby.

[00:04:47] He's like, "I don't want to do this anymore," and quits. And now he's going to help me. And I'm working in weight loss, and I am pregnant. You can imagine how well that worked. So I was living in Palm Springs. We'd moved to Palm Springs, California, because one of my old personal training clients had always wanted me to come work for them.

[00:05:04] And I'm like, well now here's a great opportunity. I can finally go work for someone else. So I come to Palm Springs to do that, and it's an awful experience. Because the wife said I was coming to party with her. And I'm like, I've got two young kids. I was also in graduate school again, this time for nutrition.

[00:05:22] And three months into this, I remember it was a week before Christmas, and they fired me. Husband's not working. I was the sole financial support. We have nothing, no savings, nothing, and two little, little kids. And so I just hustled and hustled and hustled and built a personal training business and then built a gym and then got on local TV because I was like, I got to figure out a way to promote this.

[00:05:54] And from that I ended up on Dr. Phil and just grew from there and there and there. But it always has been nutrition and fitness. And I feel like so much of the stuff that I started with way back when, like when I was in grad school, everything we were doing was around aerobic exercise.

[00:06:14] You're probably too young for this, but back in that day, if you couldn't work out at least 30 minutes, they told you not to bother because you had to get into your zone, your fat burning zone. And it happened at 30 minutes was this miracle. It is like miracle thing. And do not lift weights till you've lost the weight and all this crazy stuff.

[00:06:35] JJ: But I was paying my way through grad school, unlike the other kids, by actually working with human beings. And so what I could see is what they were teaching me in school did not work. And at the time I was going to Gold's Gym in Venice, which back then there weren't really any personal trainers just yet.

[00:06:54] Now there's 1,000 personal trainers there, but it was like, there were just a couple of them. And I was taking my clients on field trips there and I was teaching them how they had to build muscle because it was going to change their body currency. And we were doing some aerobics, but in a very HIIT training style with resistance training.

[00:07:12] And I was following-- I'd look at what the bodybuilders were doing at Gold's Gym. And what we were being taught in school and what the bodybuilders were doing were completely polar opposite. And yet my teachers were not in good shape. These people were in great shape, and success leaves clues.

[00:07:26] So it made me just really start to look at what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. And I had a very different approach. In fact, all my grad work was in lifting biomechanics and building strength. It was very opposite of everything that we were doing in the department.

[00:07:43] So this has been my focus for years, and I feel like finally, thanks to some really amazing researchers and people out there, like, shout out to my buddy, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, the message is getting out that we have to build muscle, and that exercise is not something you do for vanity. When I started out as a personal trainer, it was totally a vanity thing for people to exercise.

[00:08:10] Luke: Especially in LA.

[00:08:10] JJ: Oh yeah. It was a luxury. It was vanity.

[00:08:14] Luke: People's bodies are the commodity there. So much of it, obviously.

[00:08:20] JJ: I had a lot of those clients getting them ready for films.

[00:08:24] Luke: Right. And how does that evolve into the work you're doing with your mastermind and entrepreneurship?

[00:08:30] JJ: Oh, the mastermind. The question there was like, and the mastermind. You're like, come back to me.

[00:08:33] Luke: You actually answered other questions I had too, so it's all good.

[00:08:36] JJ: All right. So there's a point to that. So I'm doing all of this, but here I am my own business, and I am super lonely. There's no success path to follow. Especially with what I was doing, when I started personal training, there weren't trainers. I started doing nutrition, and in nutrition world, you either were a dietician and you went to work for a hospital. I'm like, yeah, but I don't believe in what they do.

[00:09:03] So it was always kind of forging my own path. And at the age of 45, I think it was, all the online stuff was happening, and I was like, oh, I want to do that, but I don't know how to do that. And so I went to dinner with Dr. Joe Mercola, because I'd written a book, and I wanted to figure out how to market this book. And he goes, JJ, the money is in the list. And I go, what list?

[00:09:35] Luke: What's the list? Yeah.

[00:09:38] JJ: I was on Dr. Phil every week at the time, and I had a website, but I did not have the box with the name and email. I had no list. So when he told me about that, he said, you need to read the 4-Hour Workweek. And I read the 4-Hour Workweek.

[00:09:56] I'm convinced there's a missing chapter because I read the 4-Hour Workweek. Now I'm working more hours. Because I see the possibility of all of this. But in there, there was a reference to Dan Kennedy, who I listened to before, a great marketer. And he was doing an interview with this gal, Ali Brown.

[00:10:17] I bought her little How to Boost Your Business with Your E-zine product. It was $297, and I remember it was a big stretch for me to do this. And then I went to her event, and that was a big stretch. And then from her event, she offered a mastermind, and I joined it. And having a mastermind and having a mentor changed everything for me.

[00:10:39] And I think a lot of it is being around other people who think differently, are moving outside the box, as opposed to the civilians. But one of the things that happened was I started to go to other events, and I was at Brendon Burchard's event and I said to Jeff Walker, how do I 10X my business? And Jeff Walker, who created product launch formula said, 90% should come from partners.

[00:11:05] And I thought, I'm at all these business events. I made a conscious decision to stop going to my clinical conferences and to focus on business marketing events. So I go to all these business events, but there's no one like me here. How am I going to do something with the SEO expert or the copywriter?

[00:11:23] I need people in the health business. So I started inviting my friends from things like IFM and A forums, some of the clinical conferences, over to the business and marketing conferences. And we'd have a little lunch and mastermind together. And I remember one day walking to the lunch at Brendon's where I would host these lunches and there's a line down the hall, and I go, where are they going?

[00:11:46] And the word had gotten out. All these people, turns out there were health people, these things. I just couldn't figure out of the 500 people who was a health person. And so that's where our Mindshare mastermind was born. It was born just of me wanting to get people together, share best practices, collaborate, and then we realized, let's do it the day after the event.

[00:12:06] And then we were like, let's have our own event. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then the event got so big that it was no longer a small mastermind. So then I launched a mastermind alongside it. And it's really cool because when you think about most healthcare practitioners, there's no marketing taught in school.

[00:12:26] And in the old days, you would be in a book and insurance companies would list you and people would come to you. But unless you want to practice in the Big Pharma driven way, if you've looked at anything like functional and integrative medicine, you don't fit in the book. So if you want to practice on your own terms and be able to actually make money and have a life, you have to do it differently.

[00:12:53] But there's really no where to go to learn how to do it differently. And so that's what we started to do, was share best practices on how to create the business and practice of your dreams. And now it's been, Dr. Sarah Gottfried, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, Dr. Tom O'Brien, Dr. Alan Christensen, Dave Asprey.

[00:13:11] It's like an amazing list of the coolest humans. And the neat thing about it is, these are people with amazing information to share. And now they built platforms to be able to do so. And so people can invest with them at the highest level, or they can get all their information for free. So they're able to make a difference in such a huge broad scope.

[00:13:34] Luke: Very cool. Yeah. I've benefited a lot from those type of events, even the think tank we did recently--

[00:13:43] JJ: That was so cool.

[00:13:44] Luke: Where we were, I guess, advisors to my friend, Mike from Jaspr Air-- a great guy, great company. I was sitting there like I'm supposed to be contributing to help him. And I'm listening to all of you give your feedback and I'm just going, wait, I'm taking notes for myself.

[00:14:02] There's really a lot to be said for sharing, especially in a physical space, getting together with people that in one way or another are doing things that you want to do and have found ways to execute. And also just people that can objectively look at you and your business in a way that you never could. It's like, yeah, we get caught up in the inertia of what we're doing and--

[00:14:26] JJ: And the paradigms. My friend, Mary Morrissey says, you can't see the picture when you're in the frame.

[00:14:32] Luke: Well said.

[00:14:33] JJ: And it's so true. And the other piece of it-- and we just were at DreamBuilder live this weekend with Mary, and I've been studying this work and especially mindset work for now 30 years. And yet we still have our limiting beliefs. And we were doing a paradigm exercise this week and I'm like, there they are.

[00:14:52] And you can't see them. And when you're in a mastermind, you can totally hear someone else's. It's so crazy. But then you're also in a mastermind going, oh, shoot. It may be something you used to do-- you forgot-- that would be amazing for your business. It's incredible how valuable they are.

[00:15:10] Luke: Absolutely. So over the years that you've been in the health space, you talked about some of the early recommendations, how have you seen the trends in diet evolve? Going back, I remember when I was probably in my 20s, everything was low fat. Everything was fat-free.

[00:15:33] And then some years later, fat became really popular and everyone's eating ghee and coconut oil and grass-fed meat. And then there's the vegan craze and then the raw food craze. And I sit on the sidelines and just watch these things boomerang back and forth. And it's been a long time since I've gotten caught up in a diet craze, but there definitely were phases where I would try different things and ultimately just arrived at a place where people ask me what my diet is and I go, I don't know. It's whatever my body is calling for. Sometimes it calls for way too much ice cream, I'll admit.

[00:16:08] JJ: That intuitive eating, sometimes it works.

[00:16:11] Luke: The intuitive eating can bite you in the ass, but I'm doing okay with it. But what did you see in the beginning of your career? Was it like the food pyramid, like eat 90% grains and all this kind of crazy stuff? What are some of the things that you've seen come and go, and what is stuck that actually works?

[00:16:27] JJ: It's funny. As you were describing all that, it's the first time I've ever thought this. I thought, gosh, diets? I always think diets are like religions, but they're also like fashion, where it's like, okay, at the foundation, I know that I need to wear clothes. I know I need to eat, but boy, those things shift all the time and go in and out of fashion. But there are some basics that persevere.

[00:16:50] I was in LA in the '80s, so that was ground zero, I think, for all of the fat-free stuff. When Susan powder was out shouting, stop the insanity and everyone was supposed to eat 10% of their calories from fat, I was literally training people out of a place called the Pritikin center. And the Pritikin center was 10% calories from fat and pretty vegetarian. You could have fish twice a week.

[00:17:17] Now I tend to be a person that goes all in on things. I'm a bit extremist. And so if they say 10% calories from fat, I'm going to get to 10 grams. I was eating so super low fat. It was crazy.

[00:17:32] Luke: And you still managed to get pregnant?

[00:17:35] JJ: No, this was later. In your teens and 20s, it's your body. You can do really dumb things in a lot of different ways, and your body can handle it. You get past that, not so much. It was interesting. I'm a super lean person naturally, and that was the one time I remember I was doing my PhD work at USC in exercise physiology, nutrition, and aging, and one of the things that we did one semester was all the body composition testing.

[00:18:09] And it was the first time my body composition went up, like I had high body fat, was when I did the vegan low-fat thing. So it did not work for me at all. And I was doing so much cardio and resistance training, so it shouldn't have been an issue, but it was. So that's the first one that I saw and what I noticed pretty quickly, thankfully, was between the cardio phase, because everything was cardio, cardio, cardio, if you want to lose weight.

[00:18:37] And granted, if you want to lose weight, you do need a caloric deficit, but there's more to it because you want to get healthy. You don't lose weight to get healthy. You've got to get metabolically healthy to lose weight. And so yes, you could just cut calories and eat Snickers bars. That's not going to get you healthy.

[00:18:53] But back then, it was all cardio, eat low-fat, eat high-carb, and it doesn't work well for clients. So they could say whatever they wanted and teach us in school, but I was working with real humans. I had my own lab experiment. I was like, this is not working well for these 45-year-old women. This is a disaster for them.

[00:19:14] So the shift after the high fat or the high carb is yeah, that big swing over to going totally keto. I think that's when Atkins started coming out. It's funny. I've never been able to do keto well. I just don't feel well on that. I do really well on low carb. I never swung all the way to keto because I can't do it, just like I never went totally into fasting, because you give me a day without food, and you've got a really angry person. And it's probably because I'm really lean and just not that much to pull from.

[00:19:52] But if you look at the diet trends, they do tend to go from one extreme to the other. You went from super low fat to super high fat to vegan to carnivore to intermittent fasting, fasting. It's like, you're like, okay, where are we going to go next? Are we going to go back to six meals a day? Because that's where it was at one point.

[00:20:12] You need to graze all day long. When we were doing the low fat, it was grazing all day long. And the interesting thing with all of these is I view diets as tools. I find that most of us write the book that we needed and then we become an evangelist and everyone should do it, and that's just really silly.

[00:20:32] Anyone who says, this is the way, it's silly. There are some foundational truths, but even though sometimes you can go like, foundational truth, we should have fiber, well, not always. Sometimes if your gut's really disrupted, you need to take everything out for a little bit and maybe just do carnivore. That could be an application for that.

[00:20:52] So I do see diets as tools. I think that if you look into all of these diets, you could go, what worked well in that? And let's say you were going to go through and say, this year I'm going to do a diet a month just for fun. I don't think that'd be much fun, but let's say that you did.

[00:21:08] You could do keto for a month and go, what did I learn from this? What works from this? Okay. I pull into my daily life. What did I hate? Okay, I'm going to do carnivore. All right, I'm going to do vegan. You could go through all the diets and see what works for you, what doesn't work for you.

[00:21:23] And ultimately, I think that's what we really need to do, is figure out the thing that works best for us, whether it's intermittent fasting, more plant-based, more omnivore. I tend to be way more, let's go omnivore with a circadian rhythm eating style. Makes the most sense for me, but there's certain people that need the bumpers of intermittent fasting to keep them in line. Well, then do it.

[00:21:51] Luke: It seems there's a lot of bio individuality that's lost in the diet wars. I know so many different friends of mine that are really healthy and they found their own way of eating that wouldn't work for me, but works for them. My wife's a good example. We obviously co-habitate, and so we eat a lot of the same meals, but I do much better with much more meat than she does. My body craves it. I could care less about eating vegetables. She's always trying to get me vegetables, and I think they taste disgusting, so I don't want to eat them.

[00:22:24] JJ: Hide them in meatloaf.

[00:22:25] Luke: Yeah, exactly. But all my friends do different things, and everyone seems to have found their way. The people I think that I see struggle are people that lock onto a very dogmatic restrictive diet that, as you said, might be good for a period of time. If you go raw vegan for a month, you're going to detox. There's going to be all kinds of benefits. But five years down the road, you might have some problems.

[00:22:48] So it seems like the extreme diets are better for a temporary measure when you have a specific goal. And then just finding your sweet spot. Because I've had a couple of situations. Like when the high fat thing exploded, I don't know, 10 years ago or something, I was like, "Oh, great. I'm going to put four tablespoons of ghee in everything I eat." But I didn't get the memo that you should also not be eating a high-sugar diet.

[00:23:12] And so I got super fat and I was like, wait, I thought fat doesn't make you fat. It was such a great news, which is probably true if you're doing a high-fat keto thing. But in my case, I was still eating tons of sugar and carbs with the fat.

[00:23:25] JJ: You put two diets together.

[00:23:27] Luke: Yeah, exactly. Unknowingly. And I'm like, wait, why isn't this working? And then someone's like, well, dude, how much sugar are you eating? I'm like, well, just a pint of ice cream every night right before bed. Big deal. But I think that all of our bodies are different, and they also change over time.

[00:23:42] As we age, what you need is different. It could even be different especially for women that have a totally different cycle, obviously, than men have. Ours seems to be on a 24-hour rather than a 28-day cycle. And so if you have a male expert that's giving guidelines universally across the board, it's not going to apply to most females.

[00:24:06] JJ: Right. So we know age is a factor because of something called anabolic resistance. So as we age, we are going to need more protein. That's for sure. Then you have things like, are you under chronic stress? Are you doing a lot of endurance training? I would put more carbs into that diet if so. And are you insulin resistant? Do you have high blood sugar? I'm going to bring your carbs down in that diet.

[00:24:32] So there's all these modifications. So yes, we've got to look at this moment in time. What are your goals? What's your life like? What's your health history? And then we might do a short-term intervention, what can we move into, and ultimately what's the thing that you can do on a regular basis that's going to work for you?

[00:24:53] And the other adage, I think there's some absolutes as we need protein and essential fats. We don't make essential amino acids. We don't make essential fatty acids. Got to have those. Don't have those, die. And water. We need those things. So we can live without carbohydrates. Doesn't mean that we need to or should, but we can.

[00:25:16] And then the other one is too much healthy food's unhealthy. Just like you found. You put the Pritikin diet and the keto diet together, which if you've eaten moderate amounts of both of those would have been fine, but if you overload, that food's got to go somewhere. It's going to get stored, and there's only so much that's going to get stored in your muscles as glycogen.

[00:25:41] You've got your amino acids. They're going to go for, most of the time, structure and rebuilding. Then you've got your carbs. Should go into glycogen storage and energy usage. And then you've got fat, very easily stored as fat. But too much, it's got to go somewhere.

[00:25:57] Luke: I noticed. Tell me about the loss of muscle mass after 30. I know that's stuff you talk about a lot, and I've noticed that definitely. I'm 53 now. And as anyone that's listened to the show knows, exercise is not something I'm really disciplined at because I just don't like it.

[00:26:15] So to make myself do it is a big stretch. But I'll get on my X3 Bar for a few weeks and I go, oh, wow. I'm starting to fill out a little bit and get a little muscle. I stopped for two weeks and I'm just scrawny again. It doesn't stick like it used to.

[00:26:30] JJ: No, it just doesn't work like that anymore, sadly.

[00:26:33] Luke: So what's the deal as we age in keeping muscles on the body?

[00:26:38] JJ: Yeah. Wouldn't be great if you could just go-- I remember I went and did 40 Years of Zen with Dave because he's like, this is 40 years of meditation in a week. I'm like, awesome. I can get this done in a week? Cool. Except it doesn't work that way. You get the tools in a week, but you actually have to do the work. And same with muscle. And it's not a magic number. Could be 30, could be 33.

[00:27:03] But what's happening is you start a hormone shift where now you're reliant on nutrient intake and you're resistance training to build muscle, not just hormones. And so what you eat and how you exercise become really, really important. As we age, we tend to lose muscle, but it's actually bigger than that.

[00:27:25] So we have two types of muscle. We have fast twitch and slow twitch, right? Slow twitch is what's keeping my arm up right now. It's keeping me moving around, standing up, walking. Fast twitch is if I was going to throw this bolster at you real fast or move quickly, jump out of the chair, those are the fast twitch muscles.

[00:27:45] And we have fast twitch and slow twitch, and then we have these muscle fibers that can go either way. It's the use it or lose it. So if I'm doing a lot of slow twitch stuff, I will lose more-- the ones that can go either way will come over to slow twitch as I'm losing fast twitch.

[00:28:02] As we age, what we're really tending to lose is the fast twitch muscle fibers. It's why you'll see people start to slow down with age. They have trouble like running up the stairs, moving out of the way of something quickly. And so people talk about muscle mass loss as we age, and it's up to 1% a year. They say 3 to 8% a decade from 30 to 60, doubling after that. There's good news here.

[00:28:28] Luke: I hope so. That sounds [Inaudible].

[00:28:29] JJ: That, to me, isn't the scary part. The scary part is that where you're losing up to 1% of your muscle, you're losing up to 2 to 4% of your strength. That's like, what's the heaviest thing I could pick up one time? That's not the scariest part. The scariest part is you're losing up to 6 to 8% of your power. That's how fast I can move something.

[00:28:52] And the cool thing is, none of that really has to happen. Yes, you're going to lose some of this as you age. But instead of this being a sharp decline off a hill, you can really change the slope of that with what you do. But it means that it doesn't get to be a drive by situation. You have to be very aware of it. It's like, do you floss your teeth?

[00:29:14] Luke: Yeah.

[00:29:15] JJ: So why do you floss your teeth?

[00:29:18] Luke: Because they feel better in my mouth.

[00:29:23] JJ: Any other reason? You have great teeth, by the way.

[00:29:26] Luke: Thank you.

[00:29:26] JJ: Fabulous.

[00:29:27] Luke: They're brand new. I just got them installed a couple of months ago.

[00:29:29] JJ: Oh, wow. Okay. Well, they did a great job.

[00:29:31] Luke: I rotted all my teeth out when I was a vegetarian. They all turned to chalk and chipped away, so I had to get new ones. But thank you. Flossing, I think you want to manage the microbiome in your mouth. But for me, my teeth don't feel clean unless I'm flossing.

[00:29:48] JJ: So I want you to think of resistance training like flossing. That's what we have to start to think about. It's not an optional thing where when I talked about being a personal trainer in my 20s, it was such a luxury thing to work with a personal trainer, and exercise was vanity. It's not the case.

[00:30:07] If you look at the statistics, and I'm sure you've heard them, someone who breaks their hip at 65 plus, a third of those people will die within a year. 50% of the people that break their hip after the age of 65 will never be the same. And we worry about bone mineral density, but it is a lagging indicator of low muscle mass.

[00:30:29] If your muscle's good, likely you will have good bone density. So what we have to make sure we're doing as we're aging-- if you look at the absolutes in diet, the absolutes in diet are getting optimal protein, which shifts up as we age, and the right essential fatty acids, like getting good omega-3s that help with bone remodeling. And getting your essential omega-6s. Just not getting them in totally industrialized, trashed, oxidized seed oils.

[00:30:58] So we need to get those things, but then we also have to have the resistance training in there as well, the stimulus of that. And the good news is it doesn't take a ton. You, in two days a week, with a well-designed program, could get what you needed. You have to progress it, because you're not standing still.

[00:31:20] So you want to continue to improve. But from my 60th birthday, I decided I wanted to get in the best shape of my life. And my husband came along for the ride. This is actually the funnier part of the story. So we went and did a DEXA scan. Have you done one of those?

[00:31:37] Luke: Mm-mm.

[00:31:39] JJ: Put this down on your list. This is something you need to do.

[00:31:41] Luke: Does this tell you your body fat percentage?

[00:31:43] JJ: This is the coolest thing. It's a little scan that you lie down, and it takes 10 minutes, and it is going to give you your body fat percentage. I like to say it's not what you weigh, it's what your weight is made up of.

[00:31:58] It's not your body fat. It's where that body fat is located. So it's going to show you your body fat, but it's also going to show you your visceral adipose tissue. How much of that is around your organs, which is the dangerous fat. Then it's going to show you your skeletal muscle mass and where it is, is it even, and it's going to give you bone mineral density.

[00:32:16] I think this is something that should be done in our teens and then probably every five years starting at 20 and then starting at 30 once a year and then starting at 50 plus probably every six months. So I, at 39, did this and then I went again at 59 and took my husband. So my body fat and weight were the same at 39 and 59.

[00:32:40] Luke: Wow.

[00:32:42] JJ: And that's why I say, we're going to hear all these statistics, but you don't have to be a statistic. There's so much stuff that you can do. So exactly the same. And this was before I put this other stuff in place. Now, men have about 3 to 5% essential fat. That's fat you have to have on your body to survive. Women have 10 to 15%.

[00:33:04] When I was at USC, we were given the norms for body fat, and what they say now is very different. And I don't think our bodies have changed. So I think we're trying to make higher body fat healthy, and it's not the case. So I'm going to tell you the norms I was given back then, because those are the ones I think make way more sense.

[00:33:24] An athletic male was somewhere between 5 and 12%. A healthy male, 10 to 18%, but really should be probably more around 15%. And for a man, you really start to look at metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance around 20%. For women, athletic women would be somewhere in the 15 to 22%. Healthy could go up to 25%, but when they got to 32%, insulin resistance.

[00:33:50] So I go in, I'm 13.9% body fat, which I'm a super genetically misfit person. I've always been super-duper lean. And my husband who is athletic, eats healthy, maybe eats a little bit too much of the healthy chips and nuts and things, but healthy, wasn't tracking his food like I'd asked him to do or increasing his protein and maybe not lifting as heavy as I thought he should. But I'm just over here.

[00:34:23] I'm not going to say anything more than a little. You might want to think about. Anyway, he goes to get his body fat tested, and he is 25%. You would never have thought it looking at him. His BMI was 21. He's normal, looks great. Skinny fat.

[00:34:42] Luke: So does that mean there's a lot of visceral fat that you can't see?

[00:34:46] JJ: He didn't have much visceral fat. What that means when you're skinny fat is you're normal weight-- they call it normal weight obesity is your normal weight, but your body fat is high and your muscle mass is low. And I'm just so glad I took them in to get that DEXA. I was like, holy smokes, look at this. Wow.

[00:35:03] Luke: I want to do that. Are those hard to come by?

[00:35:05] JJ: No, not at all. And they're not expensive either. When you look at the most important test for your health, and here's what's really, really cool that's about to come out. It's probably out already. It's VO2 max, probably a pushup test, and your body composition.

[00:35:21] If you could do those and say a fasting insulin and maybe things like an ApoB, you'd be set for really dialing in. Those are the majors. And I think we have to major in the majors before we start going down the rabbit hole of the minors. Turns out DEXA scans now can do a predicted VO2 max.

[00:35:38] And a VO2 max normally you have to go into a lab. We used to do these when I was in grad school. It's the most horrific experience. You have to be in a lab on a bike or on a treadmill. They put this very tight-fitting mask. They put a little thing over your nose and then a tight-fitting masks on because no air can escape.

[00:35:54] They have to capture all the gases. And you have to go to exhaustion, until you can't go any further. They keep taking up the speed and taking up the hill, or cranking the resistance on the bike, and they want to see what's the maximum amount of oxygen you can uptake. It's awful. Look, I had to do that in grad school, and I'm like, I'm not doing that again.

[00:36:17] Luke: Do you feel like you're drowning or something?

[00:36:19] JJ: Well, first of all, this is uncomfortable. The mask is uncomfortable, and you're going to go as hard as you possibly can. Not fun. No fun. And it's one thing to do a HIIT training session where you go all out for a minute, or even four. It's a whole other thing that you're doing 12 minutes. You're ramping it up.

[00:36:35] So I did a predicted VO2 max on the treadmill, not quite the same. And then I found out that now DEXA can give you this predicted VO2 max, which I think it was-- I interviewed Dr. Andy Galpin and he said, "This is the number one predictor of basically healthy life and all cause mortality, is your VO2 max." And yet no one's testing it.

[00:36:59] Luke: Oh, interesting.

[00:37:00] JJ: Yeah. So this will be an easy thing to do. So we do the DEXA. My husband gets that information. I get my information. But again, remember, I wanted to be in the best shape of my life. And the thing I'd been slacking off at, because we all get into our ruts, was I hadn't been doing really power training and upping my weights. And so I started creatine. I upped my something called MitoPure Urolithin A that helps your mitochondria go through mitophagy.

[00:37:30] Luke: I love that stuff.

[00:37:31] JJ: I love that. I will not go anywhere without that.

[00:37:33] Luke: I'm glad you said that. They're one of our sponsors, and I'm always trying to explain it to people. I don't know. It's not one of those supplements that's super sexy.

[00:37:41] JJ: I think it's super sexy.

[00:37:43] Luke: I do too. Because the clinical data on it is incredible for mitochondria. But it's one of those ones you don't really feel. It's not like a nootropic or something where you're like, oh damn, I took this thing.

[00:37:55] JJ: Now, if you'd been working out regularly, you would have felt it.

[00:37:58] Luke: Oh, okay.

[00:37:59] JJ: That's the difference. Plus did. It's interesting because I've been taking supplements since my 20s. The supplements I'm taking at 61 are entirely different now. It's a completely different, and everything I'm doing, it's very much majoring in the majors. What are those things that make the biggest difference?

[00:38:20] When you look at what happens as we age, the things that can impact it the most are exercise, by far, number one thing. Exercise is the single biggest driver of having a great long quality life. There's nothing that does anything like exercise. But Urolithin A, and it's specifically MitoPure because of what they've done to it, and they're patented, it's like exercise in a bottle, which does not mean that you can't exercise. It does not mean don't exercise.

[00:38:52] Luke: That's the way it happens.

[00:38:54] JJ: When they were telling me the research, I go, this is like exercise in a bottle, but I don't want to say this because I know then people will go, oh, cool. So if you take MitoPure, and creatine, what else did I put him on? A senolytic from Qualia. We do that every month. Do you do that too?

[00:39:12] Luke: Yeah, I do.

[00:39:12] JJ: Yeah, yeah. Amazing and great for joint health and osteoarthritis. Fish oil, vitamin D with K, magnesium, collagen. But now we had to track his protein. And I have a mantra, "Eat protein first." And we dose-- I tell people 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight, but we were really working on recomping, so I pushed him higher to more like 1.25. So he was going anywhere from 180 to 220 in his protein grams and four meals a day, and eating at first. And actually using the food scale to weigh it in.

[00:39:50] And just by tracking, just by using a food app and tracking, he was like, oh. He started to see just dumping the olive oil on and eating all that hummus and eating all those Siete chips and all the cashews, too much healthy food is unhealthy. So he cut back on that, up the protein, did the creatine, collagen, and he also started, and I wish he hadn't done this at the time because I would have better data, because he also started testosterone therapy because he was like 400 and went up to 900. And in less than a year, I think it was somewhere in the 8 to 10-month range, he lost three pounds.

[00:40:35] Luke: But it turned a muscle.

[00:40:37] JJ: Yeah. I say that that way because we'll go, yeah. Well, that's really inspiring. Sign me up for that program. No, he lost 27 pounds of fat and put on 24 pounds of muscle and went from 25% body fat to 10% body fat. And what's the coolest? He's 59 now. He's about to turn 60, and here's what's super awesome. This is a guy who's been athletic his entire life. He has never looked like this. He has never had this muscle mass. He's never been this strong.

[00:41:09] So this whole thing of we lose this muscle, yes. Yeah. You sit on your butt. You don't eat enough protein. You don't stimulate your muscles to do more, which by the way, walking is an amazing activity, but unless you are absolutely deconditioned, it's not exercise. Exercise means you did more than what your body was used to, and it had to adapt and get stronger. So here he is turning 60, best shape of his life.

[00:41:36] Luke: Incredible.

[00:41:37] JJ: Better than ever. And I actually dropped down to 9% body fat and I went, okay, I'm going to back this off a little bit. But literally I went, okay, I'm going to start going to a HIIT training class with people who I could have given birth to.

[00:41:55] I look around, I go, I want to go to the workout class-- because I used to go to the yoga class where I was the youngest person in the room, and I'm like, gosh, I'm good at this. Now I'm like, I'm going to the class where I am the oldest person. I do not want to be the fittest person in this room.

[00:42:11] I want to go in there and get inspired by people, see people sprinting way farther than I could. That's what I want to do. Just like they say, you are the average of the people you hang out with. I'm like, I'm going to go to people who are way fitter than me and hang out over there.

[00:42:27] Luke: It's like the mastermind concept but applied to physicality.

[00:42:31] JJ: Yeah. Which when I first started yoga, which I have this love-hate with yoga, but I think we lose muscle strength and power, but we also lose balance, and I'm just not going to warrior three on my own, or crow, or any of these things that you do in yoga. I'm like, I detest this. I sit there and I count the minutes.

[00:42:51] Luke: That's so funny because I'll do a little yoga sometimes on my own and it never involves balanced postures or headstands or handstands. None of the hard things. I just do the easy stretches, and I'm like, it's very true. But if I was in a class, I'm not going to be the guy who just lays down on my mat and like, I don't feel like it. I'm going to keep up.

[00:43:13] JJ: Don't you love the people in yoga? Because they always say, this is your practice. And there's always someone who just lies down the entire time. And I keep thinking, why did you drive here? You've been lying down. You've been in child's pose or whatever that final thing. You've been there just the whole time.

[00:43:30] Luke: Shavasana, that's my favorite.

[00:43:32] JJ: You've shavasana the entire time. Well, I've been doing a cross crow. I did a jumping crow the other day.

[00:43:42] Luke: Really?

[00:43:42] JJ: So there. Yes.

[00:43:43] Luke: Cool.

[00:43:44] JJ: I know. And I say all this because I think we tend to hear all this doom and gloom and there's a lot of information out there with the experts now talking about all these things we lose as we age, and I go, but what if you didn't have to?

[00:43:59] What if? What if you just went, you know? Huh. What if I could get in the best shape of my life now? What would that look like? And the cooler thing is, what's that going to do for me? What does that mean for me when I'm 65, 70, 80, 90? Which it's hard to think about in your 30s, which is too bad because that's really when you want to be investing. And it's just like, I didn't start investing until 50. I just couldn't think about it. And I'm like, gosh, if I'd start investing at 20.

[00:44:27] Now, I did start lifting weights at 16, and to me, that's the most important investment. So think about your fitness just like you would think about investments. The earlier you start the better. But whenever you start, you start. You don't ever want to just go, yeah, I'm not going to save anything. Forget it. It's too late for me.

[00:44:49] Luke: When it comes to the protein, something I'm always confused about is if you're trying to up your protein, as you're describing, especially as you age, can you get away with a good grass-fed whey protein or collagen protein or powdered gelatin, or do you actually need to eat a steak or a salmon or something like that?

[00:45:09] JJ: I think you and I probably would love to go to dinner together because I'm right with you. I'm like, get me that big steak. I have loved protein my whole life. That brief time I was a vegan was a very unhappy time for me for a lot of reasons. So here's the thing. You can get it wherever you need to.

[00:45:28] If someone's plant based and they're just not going to get off that plant-based pedestal, let's figure out how to work with it. You could do a pea rice blend. So there's all sorts of ways. There's a couple important things to understand. Why we're eating protein is to get these essential amino acids that our body doesn't make.

[00:45:45] There's nine of them. Then we have 11 others. So we're going to make them from those. Those are conditional. The more whole you're eating something, we don't know what we're not getting when we're not-- so you're always better in eating whole foods.

[00:46:01] Having said that, I love protein powders. I think they're the greatest easiest convenient way in a health insurance policy, and I also love essential amino acid powder, especially for people as they age. So you can eat grass-fed whey protein isolate if you are not dairy intolerant.

[00:46:22] Now, when I wrote The Virgin Diet, it was because I'd been reading all of these food sensitivity tests for clients, and I found out that about 80% of the people I was looking at had a dairy or egg intolerance. And then the next level was people had corn, soy intolerance, and peanut. And then, of course, gluten was causing the problem with all the leaky gut.

[00:46:44] The big takeaway there was fix your leaky gut, and you'll probably be able to eat these things. Of course, people didn't read. I was like, when you read The Virgin diet, it's actually three weeks to pull these foods out, figure out which foods work for you and which foods don't, with gluten and sugars, the culprits damaging the gut. Heal your gut, which could take months, maybe a year, and at that time, hopefully you'll be able to eat these things again.

[00:47:07] Of course, people are like, no, I just never eat those again. I go, well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe we're going to get back into a place where you could eat whey protein isolate, because it's not going to have the casein. For a lot of people, what's irritating them in dairy is the casein.

[00:47:20] So for most people, whey protein is a great option. And what's great about it is it has this specific essential amino acid, enough of it to trigger muscle protein synthesis. So what this researcher, Dr. Donald Lehman, discovered was something called the leucine trigger. We have mTOR that's going to trigger muscle protein synthesis.

[00:47:44] So the two things we need to really build muscles, we age, and to push past the anabolic resistance is optimal protein to provide the leucine to trigger mTOR, to trigger muscle protein synthesis, and then resistance training on the other side. We need both those things to do it, and whey protein is a great way to get it.

[00:48:04] Luke: So for someone who isn't able to put down a one-pound burger four times a day, you could eat-- of course, everyone's different, but I'm just thinking about myself because, of course, I'm trying to learn as we have these conversations always. Say one could eat one good serving of meat and then three servings of a great high quality whey protein with some essential amino acids in it or something like that and still get the required protein.

[00:48:31] JJ: Yeah. And we can just troubleshoot you right now. So we could walk through and make your perfect day, but here are the great sources for animals: pastured chicken breasts, pastured pork. I like to eat lean. You are what you eat, so I'm always looking for let's get the leanest, cleanest sources we can.

[00:48:50] Can we get grass-fed, grass-finished, and then a lean source? So it could be chicken. It could be pork. It could be lamb. It could be beef. It could be things like bison. It could be an egg and egg white combo. Just eggs, you're going to get a lot of fat alongside it. So it's easier if you do a combo of the two. It could be Greek style yogurt if you're doing okay with casein.

[00:49:14] It could be a pea protein or a pea rice blend protein. The reason you haven't heard me say collagen here is because collagen is three of the essential amino acids, not all of them. So I love collagen, but don't count it as a protein. Use it for your joints. Use it for your hair, skin, nails. I think where really is applicable is joint health.

[00:49:36] So I do collagen every day. It was funny. I was with Mark Sisson and a couple of weeks ago, and that was our thing. I was like, you do collagen? Yes. You do collagen? Yes. Every day. And I find most people are adding that in. So it's an easy thing to throw into what you're doing.

[00:49:52] So for a vegan, it can get a little bit more challenging. And I think that's where you might end up with a couple servings of protein powder to help you not go overload, especially if it's a woman. There's so many carbs that come along with a lot of the vegan sources of things.

[00:50:08] My husband can't do dairy, so he does this Siggi's coconut yogurt that's got protein added to it. Then he stirs in some protein powder and adds in some collagen and some creatine into that. So there's easy ways to do it. There's a lot of different ways to do it. Our hack for breakfast when we're on the road is to use this-- and I know I'm going to get some hate on this.

[00:50:32] There's a cereal called Catalina Crunch that's got 11 grams of protein in it and 8 grams of fiber. So I'll do a Greek style yogurt. I'll stir in some of my bone broth protein. So I'll get the protein and the collagen. Then I'll stir in some Catalina Crunch so I can get 40, 50 grams of protein in.

[00:50:51] Luke: I was going to ask you. You reminded me. I forgot to ask about these bone broth protein powders. Do you think they're legit?

[00:50:58] JJ: I use one. I have one. Here's the caveat with them. They're 80% collagen, so you're not going to get the protein you would get from say a whey protein isolate or a pea protein. But what you can do is either I'll mix my pea protein with that one. Depends if I'm cycling whey in or not.

[00:51:21] Or you could cycle whey in with it because you're getting good collagen and a little bit of protein with it too. The other thing you could do if you're dairy intolerant is do your bone broth protein shake and then have a serving of essential amino acids. And I really think anyone who's concerned about getting enough essential amino acids, or they're concerned about sarcopenia, is just to add a serving of essential amino acids, maybe two a day, at least one with breakfast.

[00:51:50] Maybe the bumpers of one with breakfast, one with dinner. I especially think there's so many women who just don't eat enough. And then they say they can't get that much protein in, which is why I say eat it first. Eat it first.

[00:52:03] Luke: You mean first thing in the morning? First thing in your meal.

[00:52:07] JJ: Right.

[00:52:07] Luke: Oh, okay.

[00:52:07] JJ: And here's the thing. This doesn't mean you have to eat four one-pound burgers a day. Here's how simple this is. You get up in the morning, maybe you have a whey protein shake with some collagen put into it. You could get 40 grams right there. That would be easy. What's your weight?

[00:52:23] Luke: 165.

[00:52:26] JJ: So then you would have lunch. Maybe you have a chicken breast. Did six ounces of a chicken breast. Right there you are at 35 grams. Maybe have an eight-ounce chicken breast. Then you have a snack in the afternoon. If you were going to have four meals a day, that's what Tim had to do. I will cook extra of anything, so I always have some protein sitting around.

[00:52:53] So you could do that, or you could just have-- I have a 20-gram protein bar that I might have with that. And then dinner can just be the steak. Sneak veggies in. Sneak them in. Sneak them in. But it's not that hard.

[00:53:10] Luke: What about gelatin powder?

[00:53:14] JJ: It's not a protein.

[00:53:15] Luke: Ah. Okay.

[00:53:16] JJ: Yeah. That's in the same line of thought as how about collagen. No, no, that won't--

[00:53:22] Luke: Do you get bonus amino acids from the gelatin powder? I use the Kion aminos, which I like.

[00:53:31] JJ: Oh, if you're using the Kion aminos, that's different than the gelatin powder. I would use Kion aminos. I'd use some collagen. You're having that at breakfast?

[00:53:40] Luke: Yeah. With a couple of egg yolks. That's my usual breakfast.

[00:53:44] JJ: So you're having those with egg yolks, no egg whites?

[00:53:46] Luke: No egg whites.

[00:53:47] JJ: Why not?

[00:53:48] Luke: They just gross me out. It's just slimy. I don't know.

[00:53:52] JJ: Wait, are you having raw egg yolks?

[00:53:54] Luke: Yeah.

[00:53:54] JJ: Yeah, raw egg whites are not a good thing. They bind up your biotin. So that would be a, hard no.

[00:54:00] Luke: Intuitively I knew.

[00:54:00] JJ: There you went.

[00:54:01] Luke: So I'll do two egg yolks, a couple of massive scoops of whey protein, the Kion whey, the Kion aminos, and then a couple of scoops of collagen protein.

[00:54:13] JJ: That's fantastic.

[00:54:13] Luke: Okay, cool.

[00:54:14] JJ: A plus. You did great.

[00:54:15] Luke: So I think the thing is though, and we're going to get to this next, is the resistance training is very intermittent.

[00:54:22] JJ: It was. Starting today it's no longer an intermittent thing.

[00:54:24] Luke: Well, I knew I was going to be inspired by our conversation. And my wife, Alyson too, she has some questions she had me put in here too.

[00:54:30] JJ: Excellent. Well, get the decks up. Both of you guys need to go get--

[00:54:35] Luke: That is super fun. Yeah, I want to do that.

[00:54:35] JJ: Honestly, what you measure and monitor, you can improve. Here's how I teach people to do this. I am a very left-brain person. So anything I do, I'm like, here's the system. And for this, I think that we should be-- I know there's all this scale trauma. What we have to look at is, in most cases, if someone has extreme scale trauma, but for most of us, what we need to realize is a scale is a biometric tool.

[00:54:59] The regular scale, those shouldn't even exist anymore, unless you're weighing your luggage. You want to bioimpedance scale. And a bioimpedance scale sends a wave up your body to test the resistance to it. It's going to predict something called your total body water. Your total body water predicts how much muscle you have. More water, more muscle.

[00:55:17] Your weight is going to fluctuate every day. So is your total body water. So what you do is you get a bioimpedance scale. You step on it every single day under the same conditions. Get up, pee, step on scale. And then it reports to your phone and you look at the trend over the week.

[00:55:35] You do not get on it one day and go, oh my God. Because that's what weight does. It goes up and down. But what you'll see is the trend over the week, the trend over the month, is, is my muscle mass improving? Is my body fat going down? That's what we want. You can never look at day to day.

[00:55:52] Luke: And you could get these scales for home use?

[00:55:55] JJ: Yeah. So here's the thing. The DEXA, the most accurate of all would be to do an MRI. The most accurate of all is to cut you open. Second most accurate is to do an MRI. Not realistic. DEXA is absolutely realistic to do every six months. When we were really focusing on changing things, we did it every three months, but now we do it every six months.

[00:56:19] Then you do this every single day. You'll go get your DEXA, then you'll come home. You'll look at your bioimpedance scale and go, oh, it's about 5% different, or whatever it is. It's not accurate, but we're looking for the relative change. That's what we're looking for. It's not going to be accurate like the DEXA, but that's okay.

[00:56:38] Renfro is really inexpensive. It's 30 bucks. They also have a Bluetooth tape measure. So you can take your waist and hip measurements every week too, which is a great tracking for visceral adipose tissue. You want to do a waist to hip and a waist to height measurement. And so it will do that, Bluetooth, and track it straight into your app as well.

[00:56:58] Luke: Epic.

[00:56:58] JJ: Yeah, super cool. And then there's also one called Oxiline Pro. Of all the ones that got rated the highest accuracy, full disclosure, it still rates me 10% higher than what I am. I have a 5,000-dollar bioimpedance scale at home, and it rates me 3% higher than what a DEXA does. So they're all going to be different because they're doing different technology. It's the relative change that matters.

[00:57:23] Luke: Right. Scales are such a scam. It's like so many of us panic when we get on the scale. And like you said, with your husband, gaining all this muscle mass, your scale doesn't tell you that, yeah, you lost a bunch of fat and gained a bunch of muscle. So it's really easy to feel like one is not making progress if you're just stepping on the scale every morning and going like, God, nothing's happening.

[00:57:44] And then you're not as encouraged to keep going with your protocol because you're like, ah, it's not working anyway. Why keep up the discipline and doing the things that I'm doing?

[00:57:54] JJ: Well, changing your body composition is basically like watching grass grow. So what you have to look at is you want those numbers that you're tracking and understanding you're watching grass grow.

[00:58:06] It'd be great if you could put on two pounds of muscle a month. That's a lot of muscle mass a month to put on. You can lose up to about 1% of your body fat a week. So these are slow shifts. And you actually want them that way. You want slow, consistent shifts.

[00:58:26] But your strength is a whole different thing. And so what you want to look at are all of the different things going on. Why I've always loved resistance training is you can tell you were like, oh, I was lifting 10-pound dumbbells over my head. Now I'm lifting 20-pound dumbbells over my head. Wow. That's amazing.

[00:58:44] I'll tell you a funny story. I had a gal who came in, and I think her BMI was 19. And she goes, I need to lose 10 pounds. I'm like, there, it's nothing left to you. You lose 10 pounds. And I'm looking at her. I'm like, okay. Hmm, we'll work on this.

[00:59:01] And I knew she needed to lose 10 pounds of fat. She was 25% body fat. It really wasn't the issue. The issue was that she had no muscle. And over the course of a year, we dropped two clothing sizes, a couple inches off her waist. She looked like an entirely different person.

[00:59:22] And her body fat went from 25% to 18%. And the craziest thing was she was so disappointed. She dropped 10 pounds of fat, put on 10 pounds of muscle. Nothing changed in her weight. And she was so frustrated that her weight hadn't changed. And I'm like, you lost 10 pounds of fat. You wanted to lose some fat.

[00:59:41] You lost it. You put on 10 pounds of-- I don't understand how you're not getting this. We have to get out of this bizarro scale mindset. We've got to know that it's what your weight is made up of. And the fact that we're not measuring this in a medical setting is so ridiculous to me. I can't believe it.

[01:00:02] Luke: So we're going to put those scales you mentioned and the DEXA scan and everything we talk about at lukestory.com/jj for those listening. If you want to make a note of those for us, Jarrod, I know I don't have to ask you at this point. He's always so great about doing that.

[01:00:19] Let's talk methods of resistance training. So resistance training, we're talking about lifting weights. What do you think in terms of hierarchy between actual pumping iron or doing something like the X3 Bar, the resistance bands, or if one could afford it or find one nearby, like the ARX machine, where it's this active resistance that just kicking your ass the whole way? Which I love those machines because they're super fast, and it feels like it's really, really hard.

[01:00:50] It's doing something. But I think they're 60 grand. So it's not something that most people could have in their garage. But I like the X3 Bar in those bands. And as you said, you can track your progress pretty easily because within a month or two, the band that was really hard is now super easy and you have to get a thicker band.

[01:01:10] And then I noticed if I stop using it for a while, then I try to push the thicker one. I can't do it anymore or can't do it. Fatigue comes a lot faster after two reps instead of 10 like it was or something. What's your take on the different types of resistance? And then we have body weight stuff too, right?

[01:01:27] JJ: Yes. Okay, I'm going to take it back. So when you look at metabolism, you have your basal metabolic rate. That's if we just sat here and didn't do anything all day long, how many calories would we burn? Then you have thermic effect to food, calories used in digestion, of which protein is really the driver there.

[01:01:47] 20 to 30% of the calories of protein are used in really the digestion, assimilation, muscle protein synthesis, which probably the big driver being that muscle protein synthesis. Carbohydrates is 5 to 10%, and fats, pretty much nothing.

[01:02:01] Then you have activity. And under activity, you have things like what I'm doing right now, which I've been talking with my hands. Believe it or not, this burns calories. Fidgeting. And we have things like just activities of daily living, up and down the stairs, all the movement. So I framed that under the activity-- some people call that non-exercise activity thermogenesis, anything that's not exercise.

[01:02:28] And then there's exercise. I don't start immediately with resistance training. I start first with-- just like when I look at a diet, I go, let's just track what you're eating first, and then let's increase your protein based on 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Maybe a little higher if you're recomping, just like we did with Tim. Then we'll add in non-starchy vegetables, upgrade your plate.

[01:02:52] Over on the activity side, let's first make sure that you are moving enough. Because here's the reality, and I think it was the British Medical Journal just came out with this that showed that basically sitting for 11 and a half hours basically undid the 30 minutes of exercise you did.

[01:03:11] So what we have to make sure of is that we're actually moving enough throughout the day. And the research really points to 8 to 12,000 steps a day is the sweet spot. It doesn't mean that more is not great, but that means that's where we want-- eight being the floor, 12,000 being-- I've put 12,000 as my new floor.

[01:03:32] So how do we do that? We're just taking the stairs, moving more, looking for opportunities all the time, stand rather than sit, walk rather than stand, all of that. So I start there first with just, let's see how much you're actually moving. I have someone I'm working with right now who, really, a metabolic hot mess with weight. Morbidly obese.

[01:03:57] And he got to me, and everyone was leaning in with what they wanted for him to do. And you need to be on testosterone. And I go, well, he's getting 2,500 steps in a day. And they show that you get hypogonadal when 4,000 steps or less. So why don't we fix the big majors first? Let's start focusing on these things first.

[01:04:16] And so first thing is let's just track how much you move, and let's take that up, and let's get into that 8,000 to 12,000 sweet spot. Once you are there, which could take a week, a month, progressing, hopefully 20% a week to get there, then three days a week, you add in a little bit of intensity.

[01:04:37] There was a study that had people walking 12,000 steps a day. One group was told to walk 12,000 steps a day. The other group was told to take three times a week of the 12, 000 steps a day and 30 minutes of that go harder, up some intensity. How could you do that? Well, you live in hills, so you could walk hills fast or jog up the hills. You could add a rucking vest. I think rucking vests are the greatest things ever.

[01:05:02] Luke: Is that like a weighted vest?

[01:05:03] JJ: It's a weighted vest. Especially for anyone worried about osteoporosis, oh my gosh, these are fantastic. So hills, speed, rucking vest. And just by doing this, they compared the two groups, even though they were doing the same amount, the group that added the intensity lost waist circumference, changed their body comp. The other group didn't.

[01:05:28] So that's step two. And actually, what the research shows is that if you do that first, it's like you're priming your body to get it ready. Because as we age, we need that cellular regeneration. We need the mitophagy, like we're getting from MitoPure and we get from exercise. Everyone talks about intermittent fasting for autophagy, but exercise is the best way, the predictable way to do that. Who knows how long you have to fast to get autophagy?

[01:05:54] So we want to get that solid foundation. One of the things that happens as we age with muscles, it's the nerve-muscle communication gets mucked up. It's like your body can't talk well. And when you're first building muscle, the first thing that happens is very neurological.

[01:06:13] Your muscle and nerves has to communicate again, and what we want to make sure of as we're resistance training, the biggest thing you want to make sure of is that you're avoiding injury because that can take you out. The second thing that you want to do is make sure that you are building a solid foundation.

[01:06:30] And I like to say we're not training to get better at training. We are training to get better at life. So I am not going to the gym so that I can be the best leg extension person ever. Unless I'm in a marching band, I don't know what that's going to do for me. I am going to the gym, and I'm doing hard things so that I can do hard things in life.

[01:06:52] And so when I'm doing stuff out in the wild, like lugging-- we travel really heavy. We travel all the time, and we take our coffee maker and our 10,000 supplements. It's such an ordeal. And we travel 80% of the time, and I've got my TRX and all sorts of stuff, and haven't figured out how to pull the weighted vest in the luggage. That's a limiter.

[01:07:12] But I have to be able to hoist this luggage all the time. So that's why we're training. We're training to be able to do all this stuff. So when you put that goal in mind, if I want to have good muscle, quality muscle, fillets, not ribeyes, I want them to be able to be strong, to be able to pick something heavy up.

[01:07:32] I want them to be able to fast. So what do I need to do? Because I can build muscle doing machines at the gym. I could do little bicep curls and tricep curls and leg extensions. But that's not going to really change me in life. A pull up's going to change me in life. A push up's going to change me in life.

[01:07:48] So when I'm designing an exercise program, and you always have to take into account people's injuries, but I'll tell you, having blown out a knee at 17, I think having injuries is not the why not, it's the why. I was able to not have a knee replacement for 30 years because of what I did to train my knee. And they told me, they're like, yeah, this replacement. I'm like, later, later, later, later.

[01:08:16] So what do we need to do that? Think of life. In life, we have to get up out of a chair. We have to get up off the toilet, out of the car, so we have to squat. We have to pick up things off the floor. We have to put things in the overhead. We have to pull ourselves up. We have to push things away. So when I'm designing a program, I want to mimic life as much as possible. So to me, these are compound movements. And what's important there is they're more metabolically costly.

[01:08:45] If you want to get the biggest bang for your exercise block, move more joints. Now, if you're a bodybuilder or physique model, this is totally different. This is like we're life models. So I think a squat-- if I had to pick one exercise, it would be a squat. And then I would probably do a pull up and a pushup. Next would be a deadlift. Probably all of your favorites that I've listed.

[01:09:13] Luke: I don't mind. I'm down for any exercise that doesn't require going to a gym.

[01:09:20] JJ: See, here's what's awesome.

[01:09:22] Luke: Pull ups, got that. I have this company, VibePlate. Makes this big cage with a pull up bar. So you put it on. You vibrate while you do pull ups, make it a little harder. I have Dave's old Bulletproof vibe plate in the garage.

[01:09:35] JJ: I've got Bulletproof vibe too.

[01:09:36] Luke: I use that for pushups. I'll do my pushups on that, a little balancing and stuff. Then the X3 Bars. And I was doing the ARX machine every Sunday, but then they closed down that little party. So those movements that you describe, I actually enjoy, especially because you can be free range. And I could go in the backyard and do squats and get some sun and not be under the fluorescent lights and the off gassing and all the egos in the gym and all that stuff.

[01:10:02] JJ: This is important. You have to figure out what do you love? What would be something that's sustainable that I can do for life? My husband loves to go to the gym. My girlfriend, Mary Morrissey gave me this check for my 60th birthday. She says, you must spend it on what you would love. And it was a 6,000-dollar check. And I'm like, what do I want? It's quite a thing. So I was like, okay, I can't just go spend it on something stupid.

[01:10:29] And I thought I would love a sprint treadmill. But we had no room for the sprint treadmill. And I told Mary, I go, your check meant we had to build an addition onto the house to it. So we expanded the gym because while Tim likes to go to the gym, he likes that energy of the gym, I am completely happy just being at home.

[01:10:49] I've got battle ropes. I've got this G7 life fitness trainer and tons of free weights and a squat rack. I'm set. A Peloton, StairMaster, exerciser. Very cool gym. That was my big old splurge. But you just build it for what you will do, what you love. But you've got to have some kind of resistance training.

[01:11:16] Body weight will work for a while, but up to a point. At some point you're going to have to put some resistance in. Because you got to continue to progress. So that could be adding another set, adding more reps, adding more weight. What are you going to do to increase the volume of it? And once you've gotten past a foundational-- two to four months, to me, once you've gotten through the four-month range, we can start getting into more active stuff.

[01:11:44] The first two months, your body's learning. Your nervous system's learning. You're setting the foundation. Because in general, you're not going to injure a muscle. You're going to injure where your muscle and tendon connect. And then that can take you out. That's a big problem.

[01:11:58] Luke: Would you say heavier weight, lower reps in general is a better way to build muscle than taking lighter weights and doing a zillion reps? Goes back to the old school, like, aerobic and cardio stuff. People would say, well, if you want cardio, then lift lightweights and do a million reps kind of thing. I never felt that really is doing anything. The only results I've ever seen is weight that I can barely do five reps and I go, okay, I felt that. Something's happening. And I'll get sore the next day, and it feels like I'm making some progress.

[01:12:31] JJ: So there's different energy systems. You can either use something called your phosphocreatine system. That's the first 10 seconds. Boom. And then you go into ATP, and then you go into fat. So there's different systems, and then there's different muscle fibers. If you want to really focus on strength, it's one to five reps and longer rest breaks.

[01:13:00] So you might do five sets of five pull ups with a three to five-minute rest break in between. If you really want to focus on hypertrophy, it's around the 6 to 30 rep range. Nothing's hardcore. I remember when I was in grad school, hypertrophy was 8 to 15 reps. Endurance was 20 plus reps. Strength was 3 to 6 reps. It was like, that is it.

[01:13:28] There was some magic thing that happened between six and eight. I was like, what happens in that range? Does nothing happen in that range? So what I like to do, there's a concept called high velocity resistance training. And the first thing I'd say is do what you love. Some people love doing those longer sets. I hate those.

[01:13:49] Luke: Me too.

[01:13:50] JJ: I hate, hate them. But some people, and especially if they're afraid of getting injured, they like to work in the 20 to 30 rep range. So maybe the way they'll do their volume is they'll do three sets of 25 with a three minutes rest break. Totally cool.

[01:14:05] The rest breaks somewhere in that 1 to 3 minutes seems to be the sweet spot for a rest break. So I generally do about two minutes-- longer for strength. If you're really trying to generate power, it's speed. So that tends to be where strength is. You're trying to get really close to your max, if not there.

[01:14:27] When you're doing hypertrophy, it's more what we call reps and reserve, leaving a little bit in the tank, a couple reps in reserve. So if I could do a set of 15 at 100 pounds, I would do maybe a set of 12. I would max out at 100. I do set a 12 or 13 at 100.

[01:14:50] So reps and reserve, you want to leave a little in the tank so that you can come back and work out the next couple of days. Otherwise you go always to failure, you're going to kill yourself. And velocity, the power training is lighter weight fast. There's this cool concept that's out called high velocity resistance training, which I think sounds like something that would be fun for you too. This I wouldn't do unless someone's got a good four months under their belt. But it's basically working around a six to eight rep range, heavy and fast.

[01:15:24] Luke: Oh, interesting. Because the current narrative in resistance training is super heavy and super slow.

[01:15:32] JJ: Well, because it's time under tension. Now, here's my argument with the slow. It's time under tension. That's why they're trying to do it, for hypertrophy. You can actually get really strong with less muscle mass development. You can get more muscle mass development not getting as strong. They're not the same.

[01:15:52] Luke: That's interesting because I have known the homies over the years that look really big and puffy and you would go, wow, that guy's got huge muscles, but they're actually not that strong. And there's some scrawny guys that you think--

[01:16:06] JJ: That you're like, wow.

[01:16:07] Luke: Yeah, they're super strong.

[01:16:08] JJ: Yeah. Because if you do the low volume heavy training, you won't build as much muscle, but you will be really strong. What do we want as we age? Well, we want to be strong, but we also want that protective muscle. And that muscle, you look at what happens as we age, we tend to become more insulin resistant.

[01:16:26] The fastest way to fix that is with muscle. So super important, good for your immune system too. But it's going to protect your bones, protect you if you fall. So it's important. But I think my issue, because I remember when super slow training first came out, it was years ago.

[01:16:43] And I kept thinking about when I was in grad school when we were doing a class on sports specific training. And that if you were training for a sport, you had to train at the velocity of the sport or faster for it to transfer. And I kept thinking, I don't want to go slow in life. So that's my issue with it.

[01:17:04] I understand it, and I think it could be a novel thing to throw in maybe once a week. We'll do this slow. But in most of the stuff, I'm really like, I want the speed. I want power and strength and hypertrophy. I want all of them. So where's my sweet spot that I could hit?

[01:17:21] Luke: That makes sense. In terms of injury prevention, the two things I mentioned, the ARX machines and the X3 Bars seem to be safer from that perspective in terms of lifting really heavy weight because they lock you into your range of motion.

[01:17:39] Whereas if you're using free weights, it's pretty easy to get squirrely. You picture the guy that has a spotter and does a bench press and it's too much and everything gets all haywire and injuries can happen as a result. Do you think using bands or something that even a machine that's more controlled is going to help you stay in your safe range of motion zone and not end up injuring joints and whatnot? Or even body weight stuff, I'm assuming it'd be the same way.

[01:18:05] JJ: Yeah. So I've got a couple thoughts. It really depends on your goals. If you're trying to see how big and strong you get, maybe if you're really trying to build muscle as safely as possible, probably machines would be the best way to go. But if you're trying to build your body for your life, is that really going to make the most sense?

[01:18:28] When I look at the body, I divide it into four parts. I do hip and thigh hinging. So that would be squats, deadlifts, that kind of thing. And then push, upper body pushing. So chest, triceps, shoulders. Upper body pulling, lats, biceps, upper back, and then power core.

[01:18:49] But I don't really focus on power core because I figure if I'm doing squats and pull ups and push ups, I better be engaging my core or I'm falling over. Then there's the movement. There's rotational movement. There's forward and back. There's lateral. So I got to incorporate all of this.

[01:19:04] When you look at a lot of the things that you do with the machine, you're moving front and back. You're not moving in different planes. You're not having to engage your core as much because you're locked in more. And it's just not mimicking anything in like the wild. So I'm not having to recruit balance muscles.

[01:19:26] So that's my issue with it, is I think we can use some of it, but I wouldn't want to do that exclusively because I want to be able to do a free squat and maybe a side lunge, and a wood chop, and a kettlebell swing, and a pull up. I want to be able to do the things where I have to use my core and I have to stabilize my body and I have to use balance.

[01:19:50] Luke: This explains why a lot of the really ripped gym bros have horrible range of motion and mobility. My younger brother, Cody, used to be a natural movement and mobility fanatic. And he owned a gym in LA and he'd have these meathead guys come in and they think, ah, what am I going to learn in this mobility class? And they couldn't move. They're basically like a concrete.

[01:20:12] And he would judge people not on how strong they were or how aesthetically fit they looked, but on the ranges of motion, they could move, to your point of what do we actually do out there in our life as a human ape. What kind of movements are required especially as you age?

[01:20:27] So that makes a lot of sense. I forgot about that. But if you're moving in this linear way exclusively, not that there's anything wrong with that. It makes sense. You're going to train your nervous system into those restrictive movements, and then you're going to be out on life, and maybe you don't get injured on the machine, but you get injured getting in out of your car, lifting your kid or something because you haven't trained strength in those various ranges of motion.

[01:20:52] JJ: Right. And your body is very specific. So you look at that leg press and that limited range of motion. I travel with a TRX machine, that suspension trainer. And one of the things I like to do with it is a full range squat. Now, I blew out my knee at 17 and had to have it replaced in my 50s because of what I did. I had to have my hip replaced too.

[01:21:15] So I've got limited range of motion. Not bad. It's like no one would probably even know. But I can't sit down on my heels. But I use a TRX trainer to be able to do low squats so that I-- this chair is low. I got to get out of the chair, eventually. But think about that.

[01:21:36] We tend to go, oh, don't do that exercise. That's dangerous. I go, but you do it every day in life. It's called getting off the toilet. So come on. Let's do the things first that are going to make it so that in our 70s, 80s, 90s, where everybody else is struggling, we're like-- I already see it at the airport. We're jamming past people who are just walking so slowly.

[01:22:02] Luke: Yeah, I noticed that too. There's the also the archetypal old person crossing the street in the crosswalk. You can just see, as so many people get older, they become calcified and hunched over and have the big lump on the back of their neck, which is probably going to be worse in our generation from the cell phones and staring down all the time.

[01:22:23] But yeah, I do see there's different metrics by which you can measure health, is like, how do you look? How do you feel? But also how do you move? How can you move? That's something I noticed as I get older. I might slip on the stairs or something. How the hell did I do that? And it's like, well, I'm not moving as much as I used to, and the body's just, over time, locking itself down. What's that saying? If you don't use it, you lose it. Right?

[01:22:54] JJ: Okay. Well, I loved what Dr. Andy Galpin said in our interview. He was like, people want to feel better, look better, perform better. I'm like, that's it. That's it. And there's this little stat floating around the Internet. I cannot find the citation for it anywhere, so it's probably just a complete fluff of a stat.

[01:23:13] However, when I heard it, I was like, oh. It said most people after the age of 30, it's like 5% of people will ever sprint. And prior to going to the class with all the people I could have given birth to and getting on the sprint treadmill, I hadn't sprinted for years. I sprinted once at my kid's soccer game and pulled a hamstring. It was like the adults all walked off there after about five minutes destroyed. I was like, wow, think about it. Maybe you've got a good answer here. Have you sprinted lately?

[01:23:46] Luke: Well, I have this thing called the CAROL Bike, which is a nice training bike, which I should get on way more often. Calling myself out on that. It's really expensive and very effective.

[01:23:58] JJ: Well, you only need, what, 10, 12 minutes?

[01:23:59] Luke: I know. But it's the hardest 12 minutes of your life. So I would say I sprint on that. There's some 20 and 30 minute- programs. You are absolutely smoked.

[01:24:10] JJ: It's not the same as body sprinting.

[01:24:11] Luke: But running, I can't tell you when the last time I tried to run fast was.

[01:24:15] JJ: So when I went to that class, I remember we were going to this place and congratulating ourselves that we were going to this yoga class where we were the cute old couple. And so now we're going to go over to another place. It's called Camp Tampa, and they had one room that was the yoga barn.

[01:24:35] And now they have another area that's the HIIT thing. And Tim's like, we should go over there. I go, okay. So I book a class. I don't pay any attention to what the class is. I'm like, good time for us. Let's go. Walk in, and the people at the front desk are like, aren't you the yoga couple? And we're like, yeah.

[01:24:54] And they go, you want to go to this class? And we're like, we signed up. And they go, you sure you want to go? It's a little intimidating. And now at this point, Tim's super competitive. He's like, get out of the way. And so we walk in, and one side of the class, first of all, it's all painted black in the room with these disco lights, and it's got this big sign in the back that says, "It's grind time."

[01:25:15] And one side of the room are all sprint treadmills and the other side are-- so you go back and forth between the sprint treadmill. You have your sprint treadmill and then a station. Station's got kettlebells and a TRX and a big step bench and big dumbbells and stuff. And you go back and forth. You sprint and then you go do burpees and mountain climbers and Turkish get ups and snatches.

[01:25:40] So on the sprint side, except for the soccer game, I hadn't sprinted in forever. And I was so sore for a week, literally where I had to kind of push my legs to walk. That's when I went, I'm getting a sprint treadmill. That's it. This is ridiculous.

[01:25:58] Luke: Wow. That's crazy.

[01:25:59] JJ: Are you kidding me?

[01:26:00] Luke: Yeah.

[01:26:01] JJ: Yeah. But here's what's super cool. And I saw this when I was at USC. We had these master athletes in their 80s and 90s who are amazing. You can build muscle at any age. You can get fit at any age. As you age, you just need to do it more thoughtfully because you don't want to get injured.

[01:26:22] That's why I always say, let's start with the activity. Let's start with the movement. Let's add the intensity. Then let's get the resistance training foundation. Then let's add in some power and strength. And on these other days, do the CAROL Bike. Do the hit. But the CAROL Bike, a bike is not as hard as a sprint treadmill.

[01:26:43] Luke: Really?

[01:26:44] JJ: Well, think about it. Think about you don't have to move your body through space.

[01:26:49] Luke: Oh, you're only moving your legs.

[01:26:52] JJ: Yeah. If you do a VO2 max on a treadmill, you'll get a better score than you do on a bike. Now, if you're used to the bike, do the bike, but you get on a sprint treadmill, and what's nice is it actually is self-propelled. So the faster you go, the faster you go, which at first I was like, I think I'm going to be that person that goes under the treadmill.

[01:27:11] Luke: I love those videos where someone's shorts get caught and get flipped across the gym floor. I'll watch those and be like, yeah, that's why I don't go to the gym. It's dangerous.

[01:27:22] JJ: There you go.

[01:27:24] Luke: What about intermittent fasting? This is one of those trends that's come and gone. And specifically for women, I've heard that maybe intermittent fasting or longer term fasting is not a great idea for women, let's say women over 40, for example. Is there any place for that if someone's goal is to lose weight, build more muscle, get fit, as we're describing?

[01:27:48] JJ: Oh, I love that you've said the goal, because everything should go to the goal. And then I think we have to define this. Have you read any of Dr. Satchin Panda's work, The Circadian Code?

[01:28:01] Luke: No.

[01:28:01] JJ: Oh gosh, it's great. I like to say eat by the plate and eat by the clock. And so when you think about intermittent fasting and fasting, I think the first thing we have to look at is what are we actually talking about? And to me, the very first thing that we should be doing is eating an hour or two after waking up and stop eating two to four hours before bed. And giving ourselves a natural overnight fast.

[01:28:28] What I see with a lot of intermittent fasting is they talk about intermittent fasting as a 12 hour fast. I go, that's just normal eating, normally stop eating for 12 hours to 14 hours. That's what we should be doing. I don't see that as a fast. Have you ever worn a CGM?

[01:28:48] Luke: Yeah, I have.

[01:28:48] JJ: Have you ever worn a CGM and eaten late at night?

[01:28:52] Luke: I don't think so.

[01:28:54] JJ: Have you eaten late at night and then checked your Oura Ring in the morning?

[01:28:57] Luke: Yes. Bad HRV.

[01:29:00] JJ: Yes, very bad.

[01:29:01] Luke: Yeah. And I do that a lot actually. If I wake up and I can't sleep, I'll eat something in the middle of the night. And it helps me fall asleep, which I always feel guilty about because it's usually something with sugar in it. I know you can have a little spoonful of honey, but I'm just like, I don't know.

[01:29:16] JJ: Really? You know that?

[01:29:17] Luke: Some gluten-free cookies. Some gluten-free cookies just sound a lot tastier at 3:00 in the morning.

[01:29:22] JJ: I was just writing some notes for some YouTube videos I'm going to tape, and they were like, the worst foods that you could ever eat. And I'm like that gluten-free stuff that people think has a health halo on it. First of all, you don't need to eat at 3:00 in the morning, ever. And if you are hungry at three in the morning, you've got to look back and see what's disrupting my sleep, or did I not knock it out of the park with my last meal?

[01:29:45] Did I not eat my protein, fat, fiber trifecta that's going to give me good satiety? We know protein is the most satiating of the macronutrients, and protein and fiber work together to slow down gastric emptying. They are a natural GLP-1 raiser. There it is. Nature's GLP-1, protein with fiber. Fat works on the brain to tell you you're full.

[01:30:08] So those three together are beautiful little trifecta. So if you are hungry at 3:00, is it a stress situation or is it a boo boo on the last meal situation? So that's the first part. But when I look at intermittent fasting, the first thing we want to look at is, what's normal eating? Stop eating two to four hours before bed.

[01:30:28] If you eat too soon before bed, as we're getting ready for bed, our body shutting down. Our pancreas is going to try to go to sleep. And no one by the way, right before bed is eating salmon. I have looked at food journals for years. I just don't see it. They're not eating salmon. They're eating some kind of carb thing. That's what they're eating. And so now your pancreas is not going to be able to do what it needs to do. So now your blood sugar is high, because insulin's not there to do its job like it needs to.

[01:30:59] You wake up in the morning, if you're wearing a CGM, you'll see it. Your blood sugar's higher. Your Oura Ring's like, looks like you ate late last night. My Oura Ring literally said that to me one morning. Looks like you ate late last night. I'm like, do you have a camera on me? What is going on here?

[01:31:12] Luke: It's really good at detecting that. Yeah.

[01:31:14] JJ: It's like, ooh gosh. It's good that big brother is watching my eating habits there. So we want that two to four hours. That doesn't mean go to bed later. And in the morning, you get up, look at the light, get moving, give your body a chance to wake up before you go hit it with food.

[01:31:34] So that's where in the perfect window, it would be about two hours after waking and really more like three hours before bed. So when you do that, you already have a really nice natural window. I don't call that intermittent fasting. I think the idea that that's intermittent fasting just shows how messed up we've come. And Satchin Panda talks about the fact that we eat something like 14 hours straight a day. That's just insane. Right up till we go to bed.

[01:32:02] So that's the first piece. The second piece is I really don't think we should be snacking. You should eat a real meal. Get hydrated well in between. There's some really cool hydration information out there about what it does. Just a little dehydration can cause your body to store more fat.

[01:32:21] So eat your meals. And then why would you want to intermittent fast? And I think there's a couple of different age groups that this would be challenging. But let's say that you want to do the fast that's the eight hours. And the whole concept is there's a couple of different supposed benefits.

[01:32:38] And I say supposed because I don't know how to find this one out. One of them is autophagy, but I don't know how they can measure this. It's not a simple lab test to know with autophagy. And I've heard everything like autophagy happens at this time or that time. How do you know? How do you know?

[01:32:55] I know that exercise induces autophagy. So that's predictable. Why don't we just do that? Because that's building us up and now we have more energy flux. The less you eat, the less you'll move. And that's been shown, if we eat less, we tend to conserve more energy. All that fidgeting and stuff goes down. We need less calories. We want to actually do the opposite of that.

[01:33:18] So autophagy, mm. Blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, yeah. I think that could help with that, but most people are doing it because they want to lose weight. Well, I'm not going to say none of the research. There's some research showing it, but I think when you really look at what's happening there, some of it could be helping with insulin sensitivity, which I think good sleep and resistance training are probably the key. And then the macronutrient ratio.

[01:33:45] But it's really because it's helping with caloric restriction. And if that helps someone-- if they're one of those people that loses their mind after 8 o'clock at night and this helps them put a bumper on it, cool. That's great. If you are going to do it, I think you're better off doing a downshift, eating between 10:00 and 6:00 versus eating between 12;00 and 8:00.

[01:34:07] That eight-hour window is interesting because apparently the reason it's an eight-hour window is this lab they did this in, and the guy who was doing the mouse study could only be there for eight hours.

[01:34:20] It's just like when I was in grad school, all of our research was 30 minutes of aerobics. Because the school period was 50 minutes. They couldn't just get in and-- we'd get them suited up with their stuff, and then we had to do tests after. So it was 30 minutes. So you look at and go, well, we got to look at why this was the way that this was.

[01:34:43] So the answer is, if you are doing this for autophagy, exercise. If you are doing this for weight loss, if it's the best way for you to do to control calories, okay, but can you get in the protein that you need in that window that's provided? Because if you can't, then let's expand it a little bit.

[01:35:04] The areas that it's questionable is someone who's really needing to get that muscle on, and that protein and that's where it can get problematic. Or someone who's trying to get pregnant. This could be problematic. That's not a time for caloric restriction anyway. So I think it really depends what your goals are.

[01:35:23] But if you were trying to improve insulin sensitivity, maybe put a gate around your eating times, because you're one of those people that wakes up and eats till you pass out. Helpful. So again, design your diet by your goals and your lifestyle.

[01:35:37] Luke: That makes sense. With the protein recommendations, I'm not good at math, so I'm always not able to remember the recommendations, and they seem to change. Every 5 or 10 years people say, oh, you need less or more. Based on your experience and understanding, what is the equation for grams of protein and body weight for men and women if it's different?

[01:36:03] JJ: There are protein wars going on.

[01:36:04] Luke: I can't even keep up because it's a different thing.

[01:36:06] JJ: It's the current one. So it was carb wars and then it was fat wars. Now it's protein wars, which is actually exciting because for years it was always like, we manipulate carbs and fat. No one ever even talks about protein, and they just have this wimpy little protein amount, and this is what we need to focus on.

[01:36:24] And so, hey, it's cool. We're looking at it now. The only change in protein is that change as you age. And so when you think about it, for majority of people, 30 plus, your safest thing would be to go one gram per pound of target body weight. There is a load of research out there by, I think-- I'm trying think of his name. I don't know if it was Dr. Stu Phillips or another person out in Canada.

[01:36:54] And Alan Aragon's got a lot of great research on this too, but for protein recommendations, there's just a lot of backup now that says it's somewhere in the 0. 7 to 1, is probably that range that the adult should be in to push past anabolic resistance. And here's the thing. You would always rather err on the high side than the low side, because if for some reason you ate too much protein, you're like, don't eat too much protein. I'm like, I'd be way more concerned about eating too much fat or carbs.

[01:37:24] If I eat too much protein, my body goes, oh, okay. I have nowhere else to put this. I can't stuff it. You don't need this for my muscle protein synthesis. Don't need it for my hair, skin, nails, whatever. All right. I'm going to go through gluconeogenesis, and I will make sugar. And then I'll see if that is needed for energy or maybe I need to store it in my muscles and if there's nowhere there, then I would have to go and make it into fat.

[01:37:48] That's a long pathway. And not what your body wants to do. And long the way, it's like if you eat protein first, it's really hard to overeat because you get full. It's full. I can't think of the last time I was at a restaurant and I ate a big steak and they came by and went, "Hey, happy birthday. We're going to give you a birthday steak." And I go, "great, I'll eat that too." No, you're full. No one does that. You can't do it.

[01:38:19] Luke: Do you think there's any risk in eating too much protein with kidney function or uric acid buildup and things like that. The anti-protein people often cite those kind of issues.

[01:38:33] JJ: I know, but where's the research on it?

[01:38:34] Luke: I don't know.

[01:38:35] JJ: It's non- existent.

[01:38:36] Luke: Really?

[01:38:37] JJ: No. If you have kidney damage-- but there's nothing out there showing that high protein causes kidney damage. I'm way more concerned about too much food, and it's really like too much food. Too much food's the issue.

[01:38:56] We have 80% of the population's overweight or obese. Do you think it's because they're eating too much salmon? Let's be honest. Come on, I know that's not a popular thing to say, but let's give people a fighting chance here. We've got GLP-1 drugs that are working. Why? Because they help.

[01:39:15] There's a lot of cool reasons they work, but one of the things they do is help with satiety. So does protein. So what if we just looked at majoring in the majors first with people and went, maybe this could help. I'm working with someone right now who's got now less than but 200 pounds to lose, and the first thing that we did was base his protein needs on where he's going. We have a very clear picture of where he's going.

[01:39:40] He's already seeing himself there. We've got the date and everything. We're going. He's struggling to get in the calories and to get in the protein, which is not what you would think would happen here.

[01:39:54] Luke: What about semaglutide, the weight loss peptide? Which I took for a couple of months because I just heard about it and I take all kinds of peptides, and I didn't know that it was the same thing as the Ozempic thing. Because I saw the Ozempic and I was like, oh, Big Pharma drugs. I'm never doing that. And then I was doing some research and I was like, "Oh, I think I already did that." But I did lose some weight.

[01:40:21] JJ: But here's the thing. So I love this subject. And I am not a doctor. I'm going to look at it purely from more of a diet lifestyle and benefits side. One of the areas that I've always loved is weight loss resistance. When I was on Dr. Phil, the chapter in his book called weight loss resistance, I go, what is this? This is so fascinating.

[01:40:45] What are things could get in the way of us losing weight or cause us to gain weight? If you think about, we need to get healthy to lose weight-- because in order for us to burn body fat and build muscle, we have to be healthy. So what do we need to do? Which a lot of that is getting insulin sensitive. That's one of the biggest things that starts to happen as we age.

[01:41:03] Now, some of that, a lot of it's probably because we're not sleeping well, we're stressed, and we're losing muscle. All those things contribute to it. So if you look at these peptides, the challenge is they took a peptide, and then they put it into a drug dose. They're two different things, and that's the way we've got to look at them.

[01:41:24] Luke: Oh, I see. So if you're getting a prescription pharma Ozempic, you're getting a much higher dose than if you were just using peptides in the normal dose that you would in other peptides.

[01:41:35] JJ: Yeah. They're using it in this high level, what they would see as therapeutic. I'll tell you how my son is using them-- the most amazing longevity benefits. And I can give you this paper to link in the show notes that is mind blowing. And where is it? I keep going, why is there so much crazy shaming and weirdness about this drug going on here?

[01:42:01] So there's the drugs, which the patent is on the dosing, the way they have the pens. And then there's the peptides. And these type, class of drugs of these GLP-1 agonists have been around for a long time in the diabetes world and been used for weight loss, off-label by doctors for quite a while. So they've been around.

[01:42:21] The latest one, the Mounjaro terzapatide is GLP-1 and GIP. So it's actually a little bit better of a peptide. So the way they work is to raise something called GLP-1, which exercise does, protein does, fiber does. And so the question I ask myself is like, these are doing amazing things.

[01:42:47] We've got 80% of the population who's now overweight or obese. There was a really interesting study years ago that was looking at normal weight people. And what they found was doing MRIs on them-- and I haven't seen anything since, so I'd love to see something now to see where this really is.

[01:43:07] But they found that 50% of those people, people who are maintaining their weight by diet alone were the normal weight obesity, the skinny fat, the thin outside, fat inside, even 80% overweight are obese, the other 20% are they healthy? And right now the stats are that less than 7% of the population is truly metabolically healthy.

[01:43:30] And their parameters sucked. Their parameters were like 150 for triglycerides, where it really probably should be 75 or less. Blood sugar under 100. We'd really want that under 90 at least. They weren't even good parameters. The waist circumference was too high. So then you ask yourself, why are these drugs working? And are we deficient?

[01:43:53] And I started digging through, looking, and sure enough, fatty liver, of which 25% of the population has what's called NAFLD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and this is one where you can walk around and not even know you have it, so that's pretty scary. We've got a high degree of insulin resistance.

[01:44:14] And so it turns out obesity, insulin resistance, and NAFLD are all cause this GLP 1 deficiency. So just consider that we have people out there who are severely insulin resistant, who their GLP 1 is not working well. Now, you could give them something that could help them release insulin as needed to lower blood sugar, to help improve insulin sensitivity, to shut down the food noise, but also is neuro is regenerative.

[01:44:43] It actually helps raise BDNF. It helps regenerate your brain. So my son with the traumatic brain injury, he's on it, but I'll tell you how we're doing it because it's very different. Can regenerate cardiovascular tissue, kidneys. It can lower blood pressure. It can help with osteoarthritis. It can lower inflammation.

[01:45:03] So my son, who had traumatic brain injury, a lot of disrupted stuff, polypharmacy kid, to help manage all this stuff, well, you give him one low dose, not the drug dose because that would be too high, but a super low dose cycled, all of a sudden he can get off some of the things for the blood pressure because he doesn't need it anymore because this thing improved it. It took away some of the side effects of the anti-seizure meds because when you have severe brain injury your seizure threshold lowers.

[01:45:31] So all of a sudden he doesn't need the other things because every other week he can do a low dose of a peptide. So you look at and go, all right. What if we could use this to give someone the edge who has lost that ability because they're so metabolically unhealthy, that now they're so insulin resistant. They're hungry all the time because they can't access-- they're blood sugars elevated.

[01:46:00] They eat food. They're not getting the nutrients they need. They can't move very much because they're so inflamed. Now you could give them a little-- take the edge off a little bit, get their body starting to work again. Think how amazing that could be. And meanwhile, because the big argument with these drugs is you lose muscle, any poorly designed diet, the average muscle mass loss on a diet is 25 to 40%. It's the same.

[01:46:26] The requirement here is that you have to make sure that they're eating protein first and doing resistance training. And then you don't have to lose any. And it just depends how much you have to lose. If you have a lot of weight to lose, you're going to lose some fat free mass that's supporting your fat mass. Sure. You're going to. But you're going to keep and be able to build that quality muscle. So I think these things can be amazing used as a peptide, not as a drug.

[01:46:53] Luke: Right. Yeah. I guess that's why I didn't notice any side effects other than I lost some weight and I felt fine. But to me, it was just another peptide to try in the stack. I didn't really know much about it. And then I got scared because I started seeing this stuff on TikTok of like Ozempic face and people turning into zombies and shit. And I'm like, whoa. I only did it for maybe, I don't know, six, eight weeks or something.

[01:47:18] JJ: Why is that information out there? Why is all this weird information out there? I can't quite understand.

[01:47:24] Luke: Clicks. You know what I mean? It's like people are drawn towards sensationalism. And sometimes sensational information is a good warning for people because things leak out into the marketplace and then we find out like, oh shit, that was a bad move.

[01:47:39] JJ: There's a really great doctor, Dr. Darshan Shah.

[01:47:44] Luke: Oh yeah, he's been on the show. Great guy.

[01:47:47] JJ: He's awesome. And if you look at how he uses it, and he works with Ashley Koff to do this, you have to DEXA. You have to do resistance training. You have to eat your protein. You're tracking. They don't have these issues, because they do it the right way. And they're using it to help heal your metabolism. Oh, by the way, there's a product that you can use that works like it.

[01:48:12] Luke: What's that?

[01:48:13] JJ: I don't know. Because there's more benefits than just the food noise piece, than just the satiety piece. And that's what's important. Because as we age, again, we'll become more insulin resistant, which sleep and resistance training can help. But there's a product out of New Zealand that the government spent 10 years developing. And it is a natural GLP-1 agonist, but again, it works much more like the peptides do, where a drug-- drugs don't know when to stop.

[01:48:47] It was always my argument with some of the supplements versus drugs. You use something orthomolecularly at the lower doses to the right amount, you use a drug, and it just keeps going. It's like, doesn't know where the end point is. And so this is short-term raises, like your body naturally would, and it's called Calocurb. It's made of this hops blend that they patented. They spent 30 million developing this.

[01:49:10] Luke: Wow. Cool. So you can get that in the States? Go over the counter?

[01:49:15] JJ: Yes.

[01:49:16] Luke: All right. We're going to put that at lukestorey.com/jj. So many great--

[01:49:20] JJ: So many fun things. And DEXA, by the way, the company that I think is super cool is this company called DexaFit.

[01:49:26] Luke: Okay.

[01:49:26] JJ: And they're now doing places all over the country, but they're the ones that the founder, I guess, figured out this way to do the VO2 max.

[01:49:34] Luke: Without killing you for 20 minutes.

[01:49:35] JJ: Without killing you. Yay.

[01:49:37] Luke: I want to go back to the movement in the activity versus exercise. So I think you did a great job of differentiating those two. When we're talking about, say, 12,000 steps a day, I'm assuming one's tracking that with an Oura ring or something like that, would it be more beneficial to take four short walks to get your 12,000 or one long one? Additionally, we have a Bellicon rebounder in the backyard, and I love that thing.

[01:50:03] When I'm like at my desk too long and I feel the effects of that, I just go jump on that for literally two minutes and just get the energy moving. And then go back and sit for a couple more hours. Do you think doing a rebounder a few times a day would take the place of some of those steps? How do we break up the activity optimally, if there is such a thing?

[01:50:25] JJ: When I was in grad school and all that, all the studies were 30 minutes. And then someone did a study where they compared 30 minutes versus three times a week three sets of 10. Actually, no, it was daily exercise. 30 minutes of daily exercise versus 30 minutes of three times 10.

[01:50:49] So instead of doing 30 all at once, you did three sets of 10, and this was all just walking. And they compared them, and, of course, the ones that had to do the 10 minutes three times got the better results. Now, they said at the time it was probably because they actually did something, whereas the people, it was all or nothing.

[01:51:08] I could either do my 30 minutes or I couldn't do it, and I blew it off. I think that there was more to it. I think there's that little metabolic effect of getting up and moving around. But also when you know you're going to do something for a little short time, you tend to do it harder. So if I had my druthers on all of this, we would be getting up every little bit on the hour.

[01:51:30] This is in fact how I'm working with the person who's losing 200 pounds, is I was going to call them exercise snacks. And I think it sends a wrong message because in our industry, they're calling them exercise snacks. And I'm like, I don't know if that's the right thing. I'm calling them little micro doses of exercise.

[01:51:45] And so I really liked the idea of dosing it all throughout the day. And just going, okay, I'm going to go do some rebounder. Now I'm going to go do three sets of pull ups. And then I'm going to do whatever. And just dosing it throughout the day.

[01:52:02] Luke: My intuition speaks to that too. If you think about the place from which we've evolved, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, everyone's really big on the paleo craze. And people focus on the food, but what about how we would have lived back then? And we would have hauled ass for a minute to try to catch something or get away from something.

[01:52:24] We would have gathered some berries for a little bit, sat on our ass, made a fire, ate something. There'd be a lot of variety. It wouldn't be, okay, I've been sitting in a computer for six hours. Then I'm going to go for my 30-minute walk and come back and sit on the computer for another two hours. The human, animal, and nature doesn't behave like that.

[01:52:44] JJ: No. We need to move. We just drove here from Dallas, and we're both getting out of the car going, ugh. I hate sitting for long periods of time. It doesn't feel good.

[01:52:56] Luke: I do too. That's why flying is so brutal. You're just like trapped in the seat. All right. I got a couple of more questions here for you. Let me see here. Oh, what about women and testosterone? I'm not taking exogenous testosterone, but I've heard some murmurs lately that older women, not older, but say over 40--

[01:53:19] JJ: I know, what is older? Because now to me an older woman's 80.

[01:53:22] Luke: Yeah. Well, for you, yeah. For you. But we think about middle age. So I think 40 is a point at which things start taking a turn for many of us. And I've always thought about testosterone as related to males, but lately I've heard some things, not taking testosterone, but precursors and things like that that support women's testosterone, whether it's a pine pollen extract or some different things, zinc and boron and things that are known to help your body produce testosterone.

[01:53:52] What's your take on testosterone and women, and is it something that needs to be optimized? And if so, how would you recommend doing that?

[01:53:59] JJ: Well, I think we could go to the bigger hormone question too. So I think that one of the most important things that women can do as they're in their 30s, beyond just investing in their muscle and their VO2 max, the next thing is to really work on their stress tolerance.

[01:54:20] This is the, I wish I'd done more of this stuff because I was like, I'm going to burn my adrenals out and then fix them. But really getting some practice in place, breath work, meditation, whatever floats your boat that is going to help you with controlling your stress.

[01:54:39] And this is where it's so great to have HRV now. We never used to have a way to manage this. And now we can actually see it with HRV. So I think that's really, really important because what really messes with our hormones beyond just the aging of our body ovaries is stress. Stress really throws everything for a curveball.

[01:55:03] So the first thing there is to really go to get a good stress practice in place. That's going to serve you as you go through menopause hugely. The next thing is to make sure your thyroid's working well. Because if your thyroid's not working well, you're not going to produce your sex hormones well.

[01:55:18] Then, of course, you got to have your protein and fats so that you can make and carry your hormones well. And then you have to have great sleep. Resistance training helps with testosterone. And, of course, getting in all your nutrients. Beyond that, testosterone is our most abundant sex hormone. It's not estrogen.

[01:55:40] So I take testosterone. I take estrogen. I take progesterone. And my feeling is do everything you can diet and lifestyle and supplements, and then if it drops to that point, take the hormones. And do it as soon as it starts to drop. And these things all need to be in balance. So you don't just go, I think I just want to do estrogen.

[01:56:05] No, you don't get to do that. These things all work together. It would be like if you have a gas car saying, I just don't want to do oil and water. So we need all of those, and we need them all in a good balance. And this is where the more in tuned you are with your body, and this is where things like bioimpedance scales and watching your sleep and your HRV are great. Because you'll see them start to shift. And when you do, women's periods start to lengthen or shorten, just go wonky, or you just start to lose your libido, then you go work on it, get help.

[01:56:39] Luke: You mentioned thyroid function being foundational there before you start getting into the crazy biohacks and stuff. Would that be just blood work, a blood panel that you would get at a functional medicine doctor or something?

[01:56:50] JJ: Have you had Isabella on yet?

[01:56:52] Luke: No.

[01:56:53] JJ: She's your neighbor.

[01:56:54] Luke: Really?

[01:56:54] JJ: Yes. You have thyroid queen in the hood.

[01:56:57] Luke: In Austin?

[01:56:58] JJ: Yes, Dr. Izabella Wentz.

[01:57:00] Luke: Cool. I'd like to meet her.

[01:57:02] JJ: A thyroid pharmacist.

[01:57:03] Luke: I have not done a thyroid-focused show.

[01:57:06] JJ: Well, she's thyroid and adrenal, so she's your perfect person for all of this. The lab work is so cool that Dr. Mark Hyman's got Function Health, and more of these lab companies are coming out now where you can really take charge of this and get what you need. Because what you're getting from a typical lab is not going to show you what's really going on.

[01:57:29] And when you want to look at thyroid function-- first of all, when my thyroid went down, I knew immediately because I'd been teaching those weight loss resistance courses like, uh-oh. I know what this is. I started to lose the outer third of my eyebrow, got a little constipated, started to feel cold. I'm never cold. I'm always the hot, sweaty one. I'm like, what? I know what this is.

[01:57:50] So we have to look at those because you're likely going to feel a symptom before you even notice it on the labs. The labs you want to look at-- they'll tend to just do a thyroid stimulating hormone, but you also need to look at free T3 and T4 and your antibodies. Because 90% of thyroid issues are autoimmune related, and that's what Izabella writes about in Hashimoto's Protocol.

[01:58:10] Luke: Oh, cool.

[01:58:11] JJ: And there's a lot you can do there to turn that around, which is super exciting.

[01:58:16] Luke: Awesome. Yeah, I know a lot of people have thyroid problems, unknowingly as a result of a lot of fluoride and pharmaceutical drugs. A lot of kids are put on Ritalin and this kind of thing and are just microdosing fluoride for years, and they trash their thyroid and don't know that that's the root cause of some of the other problems.

[01:58:36] JJ: And then you've got gluten as an autoimmune trigger. So there's a lot of stuff that's no bueno out there.

[01:58:43] Luke: Cool. Well, I'm glad now I have the expert. I'm going to track her down.

[01:58:46] JJ: These are all Mindshare people.

[01:58:48] Luke: Oh, okay. Cool.

[01:58:49] JJ: We've got your healthcare part covered.

[01:58:51] Luke: I appreciate that. Let's see here. I want to make sure I get to all my questions. Oh, tell me about menopause.

[01:59:03] JJ: Best thing ever.

[01:59:04] Luke: Yeah. I know a lot of women struggle with this. I've been around menopausal women, and they're having issues of, all of a sudden get super hot, these hot flashes, and all this kind of stuff. I haven't been around that many older women, but my stepmom and a few others seem to have a hard time during that phase of life. Obviously we could do a five-hour podcast, probably about just that, but any quick tips to ease in that phase of life with less discomfort?

[01:59:33] JJ: Yeah. And the biggest takeaway, is you can really minimize the suffering. And thankfully now there's so many doctors out talking about the BS of the Women's Health Initiative that set so many women back. Now, I talked about how I felt when my thyroid started to go wonky. I also felt the same thing with estrogen where all of a sudden I was like, why am I not recovering?

[01:59:59] I'm so used to the way I could train at the gym and how I could recover. And then I noticed when I was flossing that my gums were bleeding. And I was at my dentist, and my gums are bleeding, and he goes, estrogen. And so I was fortunate because people--

[02:00:13] Luke: High estrogen?

[02:00:14] JJ: Low.

[02:00:15] Luke: Oh, low. Oh, okay. So in menopause, your estrogen goes down?

[02:00:18] JJ: It starts to go up and down, and all over the place. They call it estrogen dominance a lot of the time because your progesterone drops. It tends to, but everybody's different. Your progesterone will drop first. Now your sleep gets all wonky. So now your estrogen's higher than your progesterone. That's that estrogen dominance that they talk about.

[02:00:38] But then your estrogen starts to drop, and then you start to get where you get hot flashes. You can't think straight. You start to gain belly fat because your ovaries aren't producing estrogen. You produce it through your fat cells. And your adrenal glands. So if your adrenal glands, you've trashed them and max them out, then you start to gain this belly fat. Your metabolism drops a little bit.

[02:00:59] So if you're eating the same, you will start gaining weight and you'll start gaining belly fat, and then your testosterone can start to go down too. So all of a sudden you're just pissy, itchy, dry, achy. And here's the thing. The minute you start to notice those things, and it could be anything from just your periods shortening, your periods lengthening, your periods are different, you're achy, you're tired, you've got brain fog, you're starting to gain belly fat, any of these things, rush to a doctor who specializes in menopause.

[02:01:31] And by the way, someone can be a gynecologist and actually not specialize in menopause, which is so bizarro. And you really want a functional medicine doctor who does this. We have amazing doctors in Mindshare who are doing incredible work in menopause. And the thing is you want to start on these hormones as soon as the hormones start to go wonky and start to replace them.

[02:01:50] I was fortunate. All my friends are hormone docs. So my 50th birthday party was Dr. Sarah Gottfried and Dr. Anna Cabeca and some other hormone docs. We were all in Miami and South Beach. The minute my hormones started to drop, I was on hormones. And so I didn't suffer through a lot of what people suffer through because I was just managing through.

[02:02:13] When you're going through the actual shift, it is an interesting thing to navigate where you have to really pay attention to your symptoms and work with your doctor, because a lab test on Tuesday is totally different than a lab test on Thursday. So you're managing with symptoms as well. And the thing that you have to do, because your margin for error at that point is gone, you have to really make sure that your nutrition's dialed.

[02:02:36] Your supplements are dialed. You're doing your exercise. You're doing your stress management stuff. Because you can't do the things like, I'm going to go out until 4:00 in the morning. None of that can happen.

[02:02:47] Luke: That ship has sailed.

[02:02:49] JJ: It's gone. I was talking to a friend. I go, remember when we would go to South Beach and stay out until 4:00? Remember that? Yeah, that's done. We can do it, and then we're out for days after that. So yeah, the great thing is, once you get through that process, and I really believe the more stress resilient you are going into it, the fitter you are going into it, the better lifestyle habits you have going into it, the easier this is going to be.

[02:03:16] You really want to train for it. So if you are listening to this and you are in your 30s, perfect, because you've got a good 15 years to train for this so that when you get into it it's going to be way easier. I had trained for all of it except the stress piece. And right as I was going into this, my son got hit by a car and left for dead in the street.

[02:03:36] And this whole thing went down while I was in an ICU with him in a coma. And so, yeah, very difficult level of stress that tipped it over. But the more you can have your stress piece really dialed, the better off you'll be. And it won't be a hard thing. It really won't be.

[02:03:57] Then you get on the other side of it, and honestly, there's two things in life that I think are absolutely wonderful. And one of them is empty nesting, but having your kids nearby. My one son comes and babysits the dogs whenever we leave. The other son, we have every Sunday night dinner.

[02:04:14] So we have great relationships, and we can do whatever we want. It's like, this is awesome. And then you can really manage this easily once you're not cycling anymore. Everything is stable. It's like way easier.

[02:04:31] Luke: I'm glad to hear that because I think like many things that we go through, people just take it as a given, and we just suck it up and just think we have to deal with it.

[02:04:40] JJ: Here's the thing I like to say, and I would say it with the F word, but I'm not going to. But it's like the forget aging gracefully. This whole idea that as we age, don't dress like that, and you'll never get to do that again, and this will never-- that ship's sailed. I'm like, what if you could start your third or fourth career?

[02:04:57] The next thing I'm going to do next year, my next part in my fitness and nutrition business is going to be the biggest work I've ever done. And what we're lining up in Mindshare is massive. And I'm like going, what if my 60s, 70s, 80s are actually my most productive years, the time when I actually have more time now and I have the wisdom to be able to do all these things, and I have the energy?

[02:05:22] Because I'm not falling into that silliness that I'm hearing. I had parents that were great role models for aging. One of them drank five drinks every night. Started Olympia beer at 10 in the morning on the weekends. He was lucky if he went on the golf course once a week. If he did, he took a cart. He smoked like a chimney.

[02:05:43] He was super stressed. He was on blood pressure medications, and he would totally tease me because I was always into healthy eating and be like, bring butter and cookies so I can have dessert. Totally abused his body. My mom walked every day, golfed a couple of times a week, had a great peer group, ate healthy. Always made us healthy food. Had a little sweet tooth. Would have one drink a night, never smoked.

[02:06:08] My dad always talked about when his ship was going to come in and how incredible it would be. And he was going to get a boat and all these amazing things were going to happen. And that was when the company that he worked for all his life was going to sell, which it did. And he was in my parent's bedroom in a hospital bed at that time.

[02:06:26] He was gone from 220 pounds down to 150. He was in diapers. And that's how I remember him, dying in a hospital bed in my parent's bedroom from cancer at 70. And my mom just passed last year at 93. Now, two months before she passed, I finally was like, I am taking the car keys from you. This is ridiculous.

[02:06:46] You have now scratched three things in the last month. You can't do this anymore. "Oh, honey." She lived in a two-storey house. She was walking, doing all the housework, doing everything herself, completely functional, completely aware. And so when you look at that, you go, okay, aging clearly is a privilege. My dad lost that privilege. But aging powerfully is a choice. And that's what my mom chose.

[02:07:11] Luke: Beautiful. I love that perspective, especially for those of us that are getting older. It's like you don't want to buy into the thought memes. There's the nocebo effect. It's like, well, by the time you're this age, this happens and then that happens. You hear these things throughout your life, and they kind of stick. And I think one of the reasons they manifest is because we buy into these beliefs.

[02:07:31] JJ: Of course. Thoughts create. I was just with Mary this last weekend. Everything's created twice. And one of the things I learned at 30, I had an amazing mindset mentor, and she said, you have to manage your environment. Do not let that information in. And so I realized I had all these big goals for 50, and I hit most of them. I actually hit all of them, and then I didn't know what to do, and I didn't make any new goals.

[02:07:56] And then as I started to approach 60, I was in this weird place, and I realized I was buying into it, that, oh, you can't wear that. Oh, you're not going to do that. And I kept thinking, what if I just did the biggest things I was going to do? And like, what if that was that? And you can easily buy into that. It's the easier way to go. It definitely is.

[02:08:20] And then I thought, I'm going to look for proof of the opposite. Now, one of the cool things was one of my close friends is Mary Morrissey, and Mary, at the age of 72, has had more business success in that year and more money than she had in all of her other years combined. And this is someone who was taught with the Dalai Lama and interviewed Nelson Mandela. She has done amazing stuff, and at the age of 72.

[02:08:46] Luke: Amazing.

[02:08:48] JJ: And so you go, I'm just going to look for proof of the opposite. I'm going to look at Dolly Parton in her Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit.

[02:09:00] Luke: I'll see new Dolly Parton albums come out and I'm like, what? I remember being a little kid and Dolly Parton was a star. I had the eight track tapes in my dad's work truck, and I'm like, she almost looks the same. Maybe she got a little work done, whatever. God bless her. But she's still cranking out albums and touring and performing.

[02:09:18] JJ: I'm choosing Dolly. I'll choose Dolly.

[02:09:20] Luke: 100%. I love that perspective. Well, man, what a great conversation. So much value offered here. I think it's going to be--

[02:09:28] JJ: I'm so excited about your resistance training routine and to hear the results of it.

[02:09:31] Luke: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for--

[02:09:33] JJ: And your DEXA.

[02:09:34] Luke: Holding me accountable. Yeah, I'm definitely getting on the DEXA thing. I've heard of that over the years, and I'm just like, who has it? Where is it? But it sounds like they're pretty accessible these days.

[02:09:43] JJ: They're very accessible. This will be a game changer for you. It will be really, really exciting.

[02:09:47] Luke: I love it.

[02:09:48] JJ: Yeah.

[02:09:48] Luke: All right. Last question. Who have been three teachers or teachings that have influenced your life that you want to share with us?

[02:09:54] JJ: So the first one was this mindset mentor at 30. She was actually a client of mine. I was a personal trainer. I was at University of Miami going to grad school, and she was a client. And I remember we were walking down the beach and she said, "What are you going to do when you graduate from University of Miami?" And I go, "I'm going to go get a PhD."

[02:10:14] And at first she goes, "Why are you at University of Miami?" I go, "Oh, I want to be more successful. She goes, "Huh? Okay. What are you going to do when you graduate?" I go," Get a PhD." "Why?" "I want to be more successful." And she goes, "Hmm, you know you don't have to do that to be more successful."

[02:10:30] Now, what was funny, I'm like "Well, of course, you do." Now, she had grown up in a trailer park and had a high school education and was a multimillionaire, and I was training her out of her beach house. And she goes, "Well, if you ever want to learn how to make money, just let me know."

[02:10:49] And I go, "This is not about money." In your 20s. And at 30 she pinged me and said, "Are you ready to learn to start making money yet?" Because she basically future paced me at 27. She goes, "At 30, you're going to care about this." And then at 30, she pinged me and I basically sold my business in LA and dropped out of that PhD program and moved into her house.

[02:11:10] And she laid the foundation that literally saved my son's life because she taught me that the only limitations are the limitations in your mind that thoughts create. That there is no right or wrong. There just is. All these things that I just now know is universal truths.

[02:11:24] And when she first told me, I'm like, of course, there's right or wrong. Of course, there's limitations. But then my son, when he got hit by the car and we were standing in the hospital and the doctors are telling us that we have to let him die because he had a torn aorta and it was going to rupture sometime in the next 24 hours, but they couldn't do the surgery they needed there because it had to be done with blood thinners and his brain would bleed out because he had multiple brain bleeds.

[02:11:52] And my son looked at this doctor, my other son, and said, "Sounds like maybe a 0.25% chance he could make it." And the doctor said, "That sounds about right." And he looked at me and goes, "That's not zero. Let's take those odds." And it's just the way we all think. And that was from that first woman, Kay Smith that changed my life, everything for me.

[02:12:13] And then the next thing that happened was I found that first mastermind group that I joined with a bounced check because I was broke. Definitely, probably not the right thing to do, but boy, I was committed. And I find most people give themselves a plan B. I just had no plan B. I had to make it work.

[02:12:35] And so I joined that group and I remember I was going to go do something silly. We have a course we're supposed to be on in a big dream and a big mission and so often we decide to go take a little left turn because of that thing. And I remember someone asked me to go do something and she goes, "You're JJ effing Virgin. What are you thinking?" I'm like, "Oh." But I just was like, okay.

[02:13:00] And I just always went, okay, would JJ effing Virgin do that? No. She would not stay on course. And the latest one is definitely Mary who's gotten to be a really close friend. She married Tim and I, and she is just, you North star. When something's going on, I'm like, "What would Mary do?" And just call her.

[02:13:19] Luke: Beautiful. Well, man, thank you so much for finding the time to come hang out. It's been great to finally get this one checked off. I can check it off my list, the original list of 50.

[02:13:30] JJ: That's so cool. I'm so flattered. Thank you.

[02:13:32] Luke: Yeah. Sometimes it takes a while. Even if you're running in circles, it just takes a minute to end up in the same room with someone, but I'm making progress. I have many of them down. There's probably a few to go. So I'm glad it worked out like this. It all happened when it was supposed to happen.

[02:13:49] JJ: Yes, it did.

[02:13:49] Luke: Much better than doing it when we're like running around a busy conference.

[02:13:53] JJ: Well, now, is the perfect time in your life because now it's time for you to get your DEXA to understand why you're doing resistance training. It's like flossing. So you connect it. So it's not something you see as an optional thing of maybe or maybe not that you attach it to, I want to be built to last. I want to be kicking ass in my 70s, 80s, 90's. I'm going to show people the new definition of what powerful aging is, not this other stuff.

[02:14:19] Luke: Beautiful.