I’m JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. Yes, I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can.And that’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast. To synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism, to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.

Join me on the journey to better health, so you can love how you look and feel right now, and have the energy to play full out at 100. You know that’s Stubborn belly fat that seems impossible to lose, or how frustrated you feel when the scale won’t budge even though you’re doing everything right. You might think that this is just an inevitable part of aging, but what if I told you that the real issue is something hiding deep inside your body, actively fighting against your weight loss efforts.

Today, we’re talking about a dangerous type of fat called visceral fat and how it impacts your metabolism, your health, and yes, even your ability to lose weight. I know you’re constantly bombarded with conflicting advice. Eat less, move more, count calories, avoid carbs. It’s enough to make your head spin.

But it’s not that simple. Your body isn’t a bank account, it’s a chemistry lab and you need to understand the different factors that influence your body composition. And that is exactly what we’re exploring today. We’re going to unpack why that stubborn belly fat is so hard to lose, why your body seems to fight against you when you try to slim down, and why the eat everything in moderation approach Might be setting you up to fail.

To guide us through this conversation, we have the incredible Dr. Ashley Lucas. As a former professional ballet dancer with a PhD in sports nutrition and chronic disease, Dr. Lucas brings a unique blend of experience and expertise to weight management. She’s the founder of PhD Weight Loss and our supplement line, Dr.

Ashley Wellness. She’s also the best selling author of Five Stages to Reset Weight. The scale through her clinical practice, writing and podcasts, Dr. Lucas has helped thousands achieve sustainable transformations by applying cutting edge research to real world challenges. Whether you’re struggling with stubborn weight gain, dealing with metabolic issues, or just looking to optimize your health.

This episode will help you understand how your body really works and how to work with it, not against it. Let’s dive into this game changing conversation with the phenomenal Dr. Ashley Lucas.

Dr. Ashley Lucas, welcome to Well Beyond 40. Glad to have you here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Well, I’m always keen on talking all things weight loss and you have an interesting perspective and background because you came to this and I want to hear this kind of through being a professional ballet dancer.

And when I think of people who have like crazy weird eating stuff and body dysmorphia, I think ballet dancers are like the top ones, right? So, uh, so tell us, tell us your story. So

I was put in ballet when I was about three years old. I was a little girl and I just loved it. I was passionate about it, but my body didn’t conform easily.

And I wasn’t like one of those naturally lean, Physically gifted girls back then. They put all of the talented kids in the front row and those not so talented in the back row. And my home for probably a decade was the back row left corner. Um, you know, people told me that I wasn’t good enough, that I should just quit.

My body kept getting injured, but I just kept pushing. Uh, I had a really strict teacher when I was. It’s probably 12, 11, 12 years old. And, um, I just, you know, she told me that I was fat. I would count calories being, being that little restricting my calories. I remember it was my goal to eat as little fat as possible.

And I would count maybe three to five grams of fat a day. During the teenage years, which is really when you need to have that type of fat and healthy energy and adequate protein, you know, ballet dancers are equivalent to Olympic level athletes when it comes to body needs and calorie needs. And here I was restricting like crazy.

Um, I went to a boarding school for ballet and there I studied. I still was behind, um, again told that I was fat, I had injuries, I always had at least one stress fracture, uh, and then I had a fairly successful career just because I was passionate about it and whenever anyone says something’s not possible, I have to show them that it actually is.

And so with that dedication, I danced with companies across the nation. I was chosen to perform in New York City, which is, you know, every dancer’s dream. And I landed there and thought that I’d be in these once in a lifetime performances, but instead of finding myself in this one, I had no idea what was going on with my health.

I thought that I was having a heart attack. And after a whole bunch of tests, the physician said that I was just underfed and overexercised and I had to stop. Um, it was a huge deal for me. It was 20 plus years of struggle and sacrifice. It was my whole identity. I give it my adolescence. It’s all I did.

And it was kind of like the equivalent of Michael Phelps being at the Olympics and getting ready to go for his swim and instead of jumping in the pool being carted off to the ER. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I was fearful for my health future. And those were a difficult few years for me, but what I learned and understood is that nutrition or lack thereof played a significant role in my performance.

And I wanted to help others overcome and ideally prevent the challenges that I had. And so I went on and. Pursued my PhD in sports nutrition and chronic disease. And after that became a registered dietitian because I thought that is what was required to help people, um, control their weight and find freedom from food.

Wow. And I liked that you said control your, their weight, like that, that whole concept of weight control. And it’s just a really challenging one because it’s as if we do have some control over it and it’s, it’s all up to us and all our fault. And I think you say something interesting that, you know, you’ve got a lot of interesting things in the book that I love.

Cause I’ve said forever and I’ve kind of backtracked on, I always have said that your body’s not a bank account, it’s a chemistry lab. And. Now I think it’s a bank account and a chemistry lab and a history book, but I would love to start with that because you do challenge this whole idea that needs challenging, that weight loss is not just calories in calories out.

Yeah. So So here is how I explain it from the metabolic biochemistry side of things. So I’ve found that what happens in our lives is we, we come up upon a trigger and it changes the way that we metabolize our food. So we can continue to eat those same way we did of the past, but now it has a different outcome of weight gain.

And we think, you know, what the heck is going on? I’m eating the same way that I did before. And now I’m packing on the pounds specifically around the belly is usually what happens. And the triggers that I find are common. They’re different for each person, but common ones are for women, usually it’s pregnancy or menopause or some kind of hormonal change.

For men, usually it’s kind of, it’s a stress response or emotional trigger. And again, we start to accumulate this fat in the belly and this fat in the belly is different than the fat throughout the rest of the body. It’s thick, it fills up the organs, it wraps around them. If you have fat in your belly and we were to take a slice of your liver, it would look like a Kobe beefsteak.

You know, it’d have that marbling in there. And after a bit of time, this fat mass that’s in the belly, this visceral fat is what we call it, grows its own blood vessels. It gets its own oxygen supply and it starts to secrete its own hormones. And these hormones are there to help to encourage one thing, and that one thing is to help encourage that fat mass to get fatter as fast as possible.

Uh, it secretes interleukin 6, which is a major inflammatory hormone that’s linked to a whole host of negative health consequences. I think oftentimes when we view this excess fat weight, we think that it’s the fat and the force pushing through the joints, and that’s not ideal either. For every pound of fat weight that we carry, it’s about eight pounds of force pushing through the ankle for every single pound.

For every pound we carry, it’s about five to six pounds of force pushing through the knee. And for every pound we carry in the belly, it’s about five pounds of force pulling off the spine, or pushing on it when we’re laying down. Which is why we have higher risk of, you know, high blood pressure and sleep apnea.

But really it’s the hormones being secreted by this fat mass that cause the damage. So now we have elevated interleukin 6, lots of inflammation in the body. In men, it secretes aromatase, which is taking your testosterone and converting it into estrogen. So we often find when men carry a lot of belly fat, they’ve got low T levels.

And it messes with ghrelin and leptin, which is your hunger and full hormones. So you’re hungrier, you’re not satiated. It slows your metabolism and it makes you lazy because the last thing this fat mass wants you to do is get up off the couch and go burn calories. So that’s why I say that weight gain really isn’t our fault.

It’s not a flaw in personality. It’s not a lack of willpower, but it’s really driven by this fat mass that just wants to grow. Think of it like an entity in and of itself that has demands and desires and urges and cravings. So we can look at this from another perspective too, is when we Often eat above our carbohydrate tolerance level.

And I’m not here saying that carbs are bad, that they’re evil, that we shouldn’t consume them, but we all have our unique tolerance of them. When we chronically eat above that, it kind of, um, in simple terms, might, we could look at it as like, we’re poisoning the body. The body just can’t handle that level.

We start to accumulate this visceral fat, like I just mentioned. And now this visceral fat starts to secrete hormones and chemicals that poison the body again. So it’s like this vicious cycle where we’re poisoning the body. And then we create this tumor like thing in there. What we also find is that once we have accumulated this visceral fat, our body becomes a little bit dysregulated in how it partitions energy.

So what I mean by that is if you carry this belly fat, a higher percentage of the calories consumed is going to first go in to feed the fat mass first.

How does that happen?

How does that happen?

Yeah, like, so you’re, you’re eating food. I’ve got a, I’ve got a lot. This is, thank you so much for all of this information.

I totally want to break into carb tolerance and how you would know what your level would be. But prior to that, like, so you said when you’ve got visceral fat, and I think it’s really interesting and really unfair too. So you’ve got this visceral fat that’s now fighting to get more fat, right? So it’s kind of like its own, its own entity within your body.

Trying to get more of it’s itself, but you said that it partitioned calories away. So how, how does that happen?

That’s a great question, JJ. One of the aspects has to do with insulin resistance, right? Having, um, less, less ability for those muscle cells to be able to take in the glucose as they should.

That’s going to partition more of that glucose going into the liver. The liver fills up with sugar. It can only handle so much sugar at a given time. And it flips those sugar molecules over into fat. Then we’ve got fatty liver buildup, and then the fat has to go somewhere out of the liver, and we’ve got the liver shunting out fat as triglycerides, and we’ve got elevated triglyceride level.

It also influences hormone sensitive lipase, which is a hormone that goes on to the fat cells specifically in the belly. I look at it like a vacuum sucker, and it’s just there. You know, ready to suck up any fatty, fatty acid that’s in the bloodstream and harbor and store it as fat. So what’s really interesting is you could take one individual who doesn’t have this belly fat, another individual who does, they eat the same amount.

And the person who has the belly fat, more of those calories is going to go in to store even more fat. And the individual who doesn’t have the belly fat is going to have that, uh, normal, healthy, uh, Energy, metabolism, and those calories are going to go into the muscle cell and fuel the body as it should.

That person’s going to be satiated, have energy to go about and do what they want and exercise, and it’s this beautiful homeostasis. But when we’re carrying this belly fat, the majority of the energy goes in to feed the fat. Those muscle cells are left more empty. Therefore, physiologically, the body’s hungry and it’s seeking food.

And so now we find ourselves standing in the pantry or with the fridge doors open, being like, I just ate. Why am I here hungry again? I mustn’t have willpower. I’m a failure. I can’t do this. Leaner people are stronger than me and have more discipline. Totally not the case at all.

I love that explanation.

That was fantastic. And how would someone, because I know we’re gonna get into how to burn off this visceral adipose tissue, um, and I know that people think of this as belly fat, but I think that we need to distinguish between the two because I still think of belly fat as the old and the new Kellogg’s Can You Pinch an Inch, and visceral adipose tissue is the very specific stuff you cannot pinch.

I remember having a client who, she literally looked like a potato on stilts. And she had a big waist circumference, like if you’d done your, her waist to height, she probably was like, you know, she was maybe 5’4 2, 5 4 with a 38 inch waist. So, you know, bigger one-to-one waist to hip. Um, but you couldn’t pinch anything ’cause it was so distended.

Um, so I wanna get into how, obviously how we lose that visceral adipose tissue because as long as you have that it’s gonna make weight loss overall impossible. But how would someone know their carb tolerance level?

Mm-Hmm. . So, that, well, what we do in our practice is we take everyone to a baseline level.

Everyone is different, again, depending on activity level, age, gender, the type and degree of metabolic dysfunction. Like, if you have type 2 diabetes, pre diabetes, or PCOS, your carb tolerance level is going to be less than someone who’s 60. has 30 pounds to drop and is pretty physically active. For most of our clients, we’re having a range between probably 50 to 80 grams of carbs a day.

And then from that, we tweak it depending on their symptoms, signs and symptoms, which is basically, are they dropping a consistent amount of weight each week? I would expect most women about two, two and a half pounds a week, most men three to three and a half pounds. Um, the, the big desire to want to graze throughout the day should go away.

So generally that’s what we’re looking at. Plenty of energy, sleeping better. Once we can get people feeling like that, then I know they’re in their sweet spot. After we’ve fully, I call it collapsed the The belly fat, visceral fat. Mm-hmm . Once we fully collapse it and get rid of it, then we find the metabolism does become more fast and efficient.

We’ve improved insulin sensitivity and therefore their carb tolerance level can increase, especially if their activity level increases and and so on.

And so for carb tolerance, when you get someone who’s now metabolically healthy. Of which there’s like such a small little percentage and I think it’s even smaller than 7 percent cause I don’t think the norms they gave us are great.

But now if someone is metabolically healthy, they’re where they want to be in terms of body composition. What do you find is a general rule of thumb for carbohydrate tolerance there? Average?

Again, depends on all those factors we just talked about, but I would say still ranges between 50 to, I’d say no more than 120 a day.

And that 120 is probably for, um, someone who’s pretty darn active, lifts weights, walks every day, has a good amount of muscle mass, and hasn’t come from a background of being pre diabetic, type 2 diabetic, PCOS.

Of which now 50 percent of the population is, which is just wild. So you talk about collapsing, and I love this terminology, collapsing the visceral adipose tissue.

So someone comes in, metabolically unhealthy, how are you assessing their visceral adipose tissue?

So for, we have, uh, brick and mortar locations and we have a nationwide over the phone presence. So for our brick and mortar locations, people come in and they get on our body composition scale. It’s a medical grade.

It’s within about 5 percent of a DEXA scan. And that tells us body fat percentage, muscle mass, metabolic age, and visceral fat. And then we know for their age, their unique body composition, not looking at BMI because we know that’s a bogus number and not a good indicator. We can determine where their optimal weight is.

And at that weight, they will have fully collapsed. If they aren’t a local client and we’re serving them nationwide, which the majority of our clients are, they send us their before pictures, and we can actually determine a lot from that, seeing how much muscle they have. We listen to their story, we use our eyeballs, and we’ve done now probably 30, 000 of these assessments on the site.

And we can get within about five pounds of where they need to be to totally let go of this visceral fat.

That’s impressive. Okay. So they start doing that. And this is, this is where I really love at home too. If someone’s got a bio impedance scale, they should get one. Um, and they do tape measure once a week.

And I like now they have that great Bluetooth tape measure. So you can just get all tracking on your phone. It’s such a great way to see it. So someone who’s coming in now and they want to lose this visceral adipose tissue. And I’m so glad you’re focusing on that. Cause I feel like the focus still is overall body fat and it’s the visceral, that’s the big problem.

What’s the process to help them lose that body fat and is losing visceral adipose tissue different than losing overall body fat or weight?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I have found that we drop weight in the opposite direction that we put it on. So if you put it on in the face last, and the arms and the legs last, that will be the first to go.

And most people are like all the time, you know, Not, not with our program necessarily, but in general, I just want to lose this belly fat. I don’t want to lose any from my face, my chest, my butt, you know, that’s all great. Let’s keep that.

And that’d be great.

It wouldn’t be, but unfortunately we can’t spot check and we’re going to lose it in the opposite direction that we put it on, kind of like draining a cup.

Um, and, and so we find that we’re going to, our face is going to lean out. And usually we put it on in the belly first. And usually that’s the last to go. Where people get into trouble is they say, Oh gosh, I look and feel good enough. I’m down 20 pounds, but really they have 20 pounds more of this visceral fat mass that they need to collapse.

Another thing that I didn’t mention, JJ, is that if you don’t fully collapse this belly fat, then you’re at extremely high risk of it all coming back again. If you think of it like a tumor in there. If you think of it like, uh, I like to use the analogy of a weed. Let’s say you just shave the top off of a weed and you leave the root, you know what’s going to happen.

It’s just a matter of time until it comes back. The same thing happens with this poisonous kind of belly fat as it’s in there still secreting those hormones. If you don’t fully collapse it and it’s just a matter of time until it eats its way back up again.

Is that why, because you know, I mean that the failure rate of diets is so low.

And you look at the failure rate of 95 percent over five years, and then this whole concept, and you’ll relate to this, like, you know, for years, the whole yo yo dieting, it was clear, but we didn’t know enough about how to measure body composition back then. It was like, okay. You’re losing muscle and fat.

You’re gaining fat. You’re losing muscle and fat. You’re gaining fat. And you’re really making your body, your, your whole metabolic profile even worse. Is it this lack of losing the visceral adipose tissue that’s creating the yo yo diet and the recidivism? Is that the problem?

That’s a big part of it. I’d say in addition, not following a good dietary protocol where you’re consuming adequate protein and lifting heavy things to maintain as much muscle weight as you can as you’re dropping that fat mass.

Number two is not going all the way and fully collapsing the belly fat. And then number three is not doing it in a sustainable way. Like going vegan when you, you know, it doesn’t make any sense for you or just eating less and moving more and exhausting your thyroid and your adrenals. And it’s not something that you can keep up with.

So I would say those are the main reasons why, but definitely if you leave a lot of that belly fat in there, it’s just going to be really hard because you’re still partitioning a lot of the calories you’re consuming in to feed the fat first.

And how far are you getting that visceral adipose tissue, like as close to zero as possible?

As close to zero as possible, I’d say probably within five pounds or so.

So then what is the process? Cause you just gave it to us, but I’d love to dig into it more. Um, and of course I loved the protein and lift heavy things made my heart sing. Uh, but when you’re working with someone, how do you, how do you, um, Evaluate how much protein they need and then what’s the dietary protocol that you put them on?

So we assess the amount of protein needed by their optimal weight and how much muscle mass they have. About a gram of protein per pound optimal body weight. Um, we vary carbs as we just said before, depending on medical history and severity of obesity. And then we usually look at fat grams as a way to increase satiety.

So if they come back and they’re like, Oh my gosh, I’m just still hungry. If they have, you know, uh, 80, 100, 200 plus pounds to drop, which we have helped people drop considerable weight, they are going to need more calories. And, uh, so we, we are. We’re not unlimited with fat, but we really do play with it and encourage healthy fat intake.

And so what would that look like? So for our program specifically, we write out exactly when, what, and how much to eat throughout the day for each individual. So it is very custom. We also provide a lot of the food and we do that because it takes out the guesswork. There’s no cost associated with the food.

It’s just a part of it and a tool. I used to, uh, create all the meal plans where they’re cooking, chopping, prepping all the food on their own. And I found that it was too overwhelming and people would stick with it for about three to six weeks and then they would just give up and give in. So I decided to support people a little bit more with breakfast, some of lunch, and some of their snacks through the day.

Dinner is their full responsibility, and they add some fresh veggies to lunch, and then healthy fats depending on body size and goals and needs. And then as we go through the program, they gradually rele Gradually release any of our food. So they’re becoming totally self sufficient. It’s kind of like starting with training wheels while riding a bike and taking one off at a time.

And at the end, they have no idea that they’re actually riding all on their own. Um, we find that 95 percent of our clients hit their optimal weight. Which is a huge success compared to others.

Yeah, and so they hit their optimal weight. What do you do, because we know how the failure rates, so what do you do to ensure that they stick with it?

Yes, sticking with it is the key. I think it’s one practice to drop the weight, and it’s a whole other thing. So, for us, we have a maintenance program, an alumni community, where we do not let our clients go. We’re still helping them, guiding them. We also put them through a little bit of, I don’t love the term, reverse dieting, but some Slowly increasing their caloric loads so that we can get their calories from this deficit that was required for weight loss into a healthy maintenance range.

And so at that time, we’re really closely tracking their macros, increasing them slowly as they go, and then just helping them practice the skills that they need to keep the weight off for good.

What is a typical There may not be a typical, but do you have a typical type of caloric deficit that you put someone in when you’re working with them?

Honestly, JJ, I don’t count calories and I have no idea where their calorie load is. I don’t. Um, we, we make sure that they’re as adequate protein, carbs are where they need to be to be not hungry, and then fat to fill in the rest. And I, I can’t tell you how many calories there can

be. Yeah. Well, I brought it up cause you said it.

So I was like going, well, how would you know? And don’t you find that if you have them eating the protein that they need and then they’re getting in the carbs to get the fiber and they’re getting the rest is fat, they’re full. Like that’s what I’m saying. Yes. They’re just fine.

Yes. And their signals come back.

Before they start, they can’t trust their body. They can’t trust the signals. They’re all out of whack. They don’t know if they’re hungry, if it’s a craving, if they’re full. And once we get those macros dialed in, and like you said, eating adequate protein, oh my gosh, their satiety signals come back online.

Um, and it takes a little bit of time to be able to, to trust the body when it’s been telling you something that’s not true for many years, for some of our clients, their entire lives.

Well, so do you have issues where they’re on that and they’re not losing? And if so, what are you, what are some of the things that you’ve seen come up?

Like, what are the challenges that are causing it?

Yeah, we call, we, we tackle that in our meal plan review, and I have a whole list of things that we check off as we go. So I would say, I always say, do not taste, sip, or digest anything, but what’s on your meal plan. Because oftentimes these little things creep back in.

Maybe it’s, uh, you know, they let go of alcohol at the beginning and they’re adding it back in, or they’re, Saying, Oh my gosh, I’m eating exactly what’s on the plan, but then they’re making lunch for their kids and little bits keep coming in. For us on weight loss, we let go of nuts and cheese, not because they’re bad, but because they’re trigger foods.

And we have to recognize, I mean, for me, I could eat an entire bag of salted macadamia nuts. Which is enough energy for me, yeah, for a day. And then go eat dinner because it’s not super filling. Um, cheese is a big trigger food for a lot of us. Oh my gosh. The peanut butter jar is a big trigger.

Salted almond butter.

I’m so glad you brought that up because too much healthy food is unhealthy. And we have to know those things. If it is a trigger, I’ll never forget getting a bag of salted mixed nuts and driving in the car. And realizing I’d eaten a two pound bag of, I was like, Oh my gosh, you know? So it’s such a great point.

I mean, someone might be able to take an ounce of feta and sprinkle it on a salad and someone else might be nose, nose in the feta brine, right?

Yeah. We’re all so different for me. It’s Haagen Dazs ice cream is my trigger food, specifically cookie dough. Like if it’s in the house, I’m really going to eat it.

And I have good discipline. Like I was a top athlete who beat their body up and just put it through. Like I do have discipline, but when it comes to that man, something’s different, differently wired. For my husband, he doesn’t even look in the freezer. For him, it is tortilla chips and salsa. For me, like that doesn’t have any impact.

So it is recognizing what these trigger foods are. Um, what we just talked about JJ is basically, I disagree with, um, eating everything in moderation. I think that, you know, especially with these highly palatable foods that are out there, they are created to addict us, um, you know, big food, I think big pharma has something playing in there with it.

So oh my gosh, they just override our satiety signals. I really dislike that phrase, eat everything in moderation. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it doesn’t work if you have trigger foods, it doesn’t work if you have food intolerance. It’s just, it’s just ridiculous. And I think it’s a way for them to make ultra processed foods okay.

Yeah,

so, you know, I’m I’m right there with you on that piece of it It’s like well on on a lot of these pieces. So there was another thing in here. So we talked about protein and I’d love to dig into because I mentioned when people go on I call it a poorly planned diet. They’re going to lose fat and muscle and then gain fat back.

So you mentioned that you, and I, and makes my heart sing that you put people on protein and lifting heavy things. So how are you having them do that? How’s that getting monitored to make sure that they’re doing that? Um, you know, because again, you’re not with them at home. So how are you making sure that they’re actually.

And

we’re with them as much as one possibly could be at home. I mean, it’s all we do. You got a hand cam on them? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, they, um, we, this is all we do is weight loss. You know, a lot of other companies are doing weight loss and aesthetics and fitness and, and wrap it all in. And it, it’s a big deal.

I can tell you that helping someone drop weight is a 110%, requires 110 percent focus, support, and accountability. So we, um, chat with our clients every week. They have unlimited coaching, so oftentimes they’re texting us. They can show us labels. We have them write down their food. Keeping a food journal is a requirement for our clients, because that’s the only way we can figure out what’s happening.

If they’re not dropping weight. As your body slims down, I find that your dietary needs change as well and have to reflect your body changes. And so we’re constantly tweaking things as clients come in. We’re making sure that they, you know, take pictures of their food if they want to. I mean, we’re just very, very much on top of it.

They, they create really strong relationships with us. If they’re near a brick and mortar, they can come in whenever they want. And so we’re just, uh, encouraging them, motivating them when they see. And this weight loss and that they can naturally without any medications or supplements, feel amazing, then that motivates them to want to do more and be more.

Uh, so it’s just, we really rarely find anyone who’s not doing as we ask because you know, they’re signing up for this. I know

that’s the other part. It’s like why it’s so important for someone to come in and commit with their time and their money. And, and I feel like that’s one of the big challenges with an insurance.

You know, we need catastrophic insurance for health care, but I feel like for a lot of this stuff, like you end up taking better care of your pets and your cars because you don’t have the insurance for those things, right? For your pets. So, you know, it’s like you look at this and go, they’re paying out of pocket so they’re paying attention.

Definitely. Many people will say, you know, thankfully I paid for this because when I looked at that bag of chips or that bread bowl, man, it wasn’t worth what I’ve invested in my, in my program, in my life. And people end up saving money in the end. They get off medications, they, uh, reverse serious conditions.

I was just, Sat chatting with one of our clients. She’s 72 years old, dropped 30 pounds, had severe sleep apnea and had no idea she would even impact sleep apnea. That’s not why she started. She started because her husband had high blood pressure and needed to do it. And he asked her to do it with him. And she completely reversed her sleep apnea, which, you CPAP.

Unbelievable. So many stories like this, so, um, it is totally worth investing in your health if you were at threshold and you are ready to make the change. That is what’s required.

So someone says, yes, they invest, they start on the diet now, I still want to go to what is that, you said lift heavy things, so what is the exercise recommendation that you are giving them?

Well, so for us, I think exercise is really important. It’s a huge aspect to wellness, maintaining muscle mass. I don’t find in and of itself is a big weight loss tool. Right. So for us, we have our clients either maintain where they are right now, or at least do a 30 minute brisk walk every day. After they reduce some of that excess fat weight, less force, less inflammation going through the body, then they naturally have more energy.

And at that point we have an ideal schedule of what they should incorporate into their routine slowly and surely as they’re feeling good. So usually it’s around week six where most of our clients are feeling ready to incorporate more. So we always encourage, uh, Some kind of resistance training, lifting.

That’s why I said lifting something heavy. It doesn’t have to be going to the gym, but some kind of overload on the muscles and nothing extreme either. Just like something where we’re doing a full body exercise and lifting something that is going to cause some kind of muscle soreness, but not injury. Um, and then I’m always a fan of, uh, Of course, maintaining that 30 minute brisk walk a day and then adding, if they feel up to it, some kind of high intensity interval training a few times a week.

That’s really where we focus.

So someone has lost the weight. What are the key habits? Because again, we have dismal, dismal statistics on maintaining weight loss. So what’s the advice for someone to do? Keep it off. What are those key things? Because I remember looking at a study that said very specifically, like, and it is that what got you here won’t get you there, that the habits you need for maintaining weight loss are different than the habits that you needed to lose the weight, which I don’t think we talk about enough.

I’m glad you brought it up. So what would those key things that someone needs to do to make sure that all their hard work stays that way?

Yeah. So one thing we haven’t really touched on is that, uh, the, the mindset piece. And I think that 80 percent of any change and weight loss is included here comes from the mind.

The mental, emotional, the habits, behaviors, and a lot of programs. And a lot of times when we go through dropping weight, we think it’s just this calorie piece, right? Eat less, move more calories in, calories out, help me find the success here. We’re, you know, with these new drugs, that’s really the focus is really eating less, right?

Taking less calories in. But 80 percent of it comes from the mind. And I think for a lot of people, it’s a weight loss is an addiction recovery process. So if, this is my theory here, is that if you just drop the weight, looking at the science and just looking at the food, your weight’s going to drop, but you have now still all of these stories that aren’t serving you, right?

It’s a, it’s a process of letting go. fat weight that’s not serving you and all the emotions that are tied to it. There are with each level of fat weight, there are emotions tied to it. I kind of, I think that it’s like, um, the, the rings of a tree, you know, as we are losing weight mentally and emotionally, I found my clients kind of hit these set points that are correlated with something that happened in their lives or some kind of story.

And they’re having to work through that piece. It could be trauma, past experiences, stories that they’ve created that really aren’t true, uh, maybe a fixed mindset around a certain weight and we hit these plateaus and they have to bust through that ring and then move to the next and then, and then they hit that.

And, and usually it’s not a metabolic plateau. It’s, it’s a mental, um, Plateau that they have to bust through. So what we’re doing every week is we’re working through these sabotagers and these triggers and these thoughts and these experiences and why we eat the way that we do, because when the mindset can follow the weight, then we’re going to be able to keep it off.

But if we haven’t done the mental and emotional lifestyle work, then that weight will drop, but it’s just a matter of time for it to meet back up with the mind and the, the, and the senses. So, I think a big reason why our clients are successful and others, uh, maybe is because they’ve done the deep work, they’ve changed the story, they’ve created a new identity, uh, they have a very strong why that’s bigger than themselves.

And they keep in alignment with that. They keep integrity with themselves. Um, and they, and they really have to change their story to be able to find success and keep it off. So bigger than exercise or eating the right things, I really believe is having the right story and the right mindset.

Well, the reality is the strategies are everywhere.

So clearly there’s more to it than just deploying the strategies. So what about the 45, 50 year old, you know, right in the throes of perimenopause? Is there anything different that you would address with them?

No, because our program is actually crafted to support the metabolic needs of that individual.

So it’s actually perfect for those individuals. I mean, our average age client is 55 years old. Um, so they are, you know, they’re after, they’re more in that menopausal state, but I find with perimenopause, it’s very similar. Maybe there, you know, we have, again, Depends on the individual with amount of carbohydrates, if they’ve got adrenal fatigue, hypothyroid, but really our dietary protocol is there to support those individuals already.

Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, insulin resistant with high inflammation, like you’re doing the exact things to help. What about someone, um, early on, I worked with a really amazing doctor helping her do training programs and she would talk about belly fat. And when I think of that, I’m talking visceral fat in terms of either being insulin resistant or having elevated cortisol.

Uh, what do you find here with the stress side of things?

Well, when we were talking about what are the reasons why people might not be dropping weight, stress is so big, and that didn’t come up. But I will often see clients, they’re saying, I’m working so hard, I’m doing all the right things. And sometimes them just dropping weight.

Stressing about the scale, not moving creates stress and cortisol. And we know that if we think our stress is negative, then we do secrete cortisol, which is going to increase hormone sensitive lipase and bring more fat into store in the belly. So definitely a negative perception towards stress. And if we think of the stressful situation and say, well, you know, there’s a study out there, which is interesting on stress, looking at our perception of it.

And if we think of the stressful situation and say, well, you Said of as a, a challenge, as something that we can rise up above and learn resilience. We actually don’t secrete cortisol. We, we secrete DHEA, which allows us to increase our mental focus and acuity and lets us rise above. So stress doesn’t necessarily have to be negative, but in our society we do have a negative connotation around it.

So much of that is languaging. It reminded me when you said that I had a mentor at 30 and you were not allowed to bring her a problem.

Oh, I like that.

We only called them challenges. With opportunities, right? So no problems. And she really taught me all the languaging things because so much of this is just your perception.

So much of stress is perception. So I love the way that you, you really have framed this as, you know, the, the, um, chemistry lab of your body and how that can lead to weight gain that can compound itself and what you need to do in order to reverse that and collapse it. That’s a, I love that term, so thank you for that.

You’ve got for everybody listing your ebook on the five steps to reset the scale and we are gonna put that at jjvirgin. com forward slash Ashley, A S H H L E Y, so we’ll put that there so everyone can grab it. Do you want to just give everyone a little, um, I’ll show the book, a little highlight of what they can find in the book?

Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the things we talked about today on, um, making sure that you understand your optimal weight. Uh, fully collapsing that belly fat, that visceral fat, making sure you’re eating the right food, those macros we talked about, uh, making sure about mindset that you understand 80 percent of it’s coming from the mind and what do we do and how do we tackle that.

Looking at it from an addiction recovery standpoint and then also maintenance and the keys to maintenance and how like, you know, we talked about how do we actually maintain this weight once we drop it. So those are the five steps and that’s what I talk about in the book.

Great. And I love the fact that you really put that maintenance piece in there because When I look at all of this, to me, if you aren’t going to put that piece in, don’t do it.

Don’t even start because you’ll just become that statistic and you actually make your metabolism worse. You just do more damage. So I’m glad that you focused on that. And it’s an actual step because usually for most people, it’s actually an afterthought, which isn’t helpful. Cool. So that jjvirgin. com forward slash Ashley.

And I look forward to meet you in person.

Oh yeah, me too. Thanks jj.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life. To ensure you look and feel great and are built to last, check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jj virgin.com. And make sure to follow my [email protected] so you don’t miss us.

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Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

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