WB40 Ep558 YT I Just Turned 60 Heres My Best Advice
[00:00:00] I am JJ Virgin, PhD Dropout. Sorry, mom, turn four time New York Times bestselling 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 [00:00:25] 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 [00:00:50] now and have the energy to play full out at 100.
No one could have prepared me for turning 50. Now, if they had, I would’ve just turned 50 way sooner. I mean, this decade has been an amazing time of possibility and reinvention, and I’m expecting my sixties to be. Even better [00:01:15] now. Lucky for me turns out having a positive attitude is super important in creating your best life at 50 and beyond.
There was a study that was published in Attitudes and social cognition by researchers from Yale and Harvard, and it was titled, longevity Increased by Positive Self-Perceptions of Aging. Here’s what it said, this is wild. It turns out that a positive attitude [00:01:40] gives you seven and a half more years of life, even when I adjusted for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness and functional health covariates.
So my first step in preparing for my 60th was to get. Fired up about it and to set new goals. Now it made me think back to 2019. I got to go to the Grammys and that year, J Lo, Dolly [00:02:05] Parton and Diana Ross were, were like center stage. Dolly Parton was really the host of the whole thing, and she was 72 at the time.
J Lo was 50 and Diana was there celebrating her 70th. And they were amazing. They literally stole the show, especially Dolly. And then there’s Elon Musk’s mom who got her first modeling cover at age 70. And then recently I was talking to my buddy, Dr. Daniel Aman, [00:02:30] and he reminded me that so often in sports, the best stuff happens in the fourth quarter.
So I am focused now on making sure that I can play full out in my seventies, my eighties, my nineties and beyond, and that I’m doing this daily to ensure that my body and brain are built to last. So here’s what I’m up to, and my hope is, is that if you are 50 plus, [00:02:55] you use this as an inspiration and motivation to make your fifties and beyond.
Your best years. Okay, so first, since mindset is everything, I have amazing role models to help me here. Now first, mindset and mindfulness. So I have amazing women that I learned from and hang out with. Mary Morrisey, Sam Horn, Sherry Sola. These are women who’ve [00:03:20] gone before me and are living purpose-driven, driven lives, and.
I also have career goals that stretch and excite me. I’m actually more excited about my career now than ever, and I’ve been working in the wellness world in one form or another for 40 plus years. I set some experience goals over the next decade of what I want to do, where I wanna travel to, and then I also set some goals [00:03:45] on.
Fitness, and this is a big one. I think one of the biggest challenges that happens with us is we get into these ruts and the thing is is as you’re aging, if you’re not continuing to progress in your fitness, you are going to be declining. You know, at the age of 40, we start losing 1% of our muscle a year up to that and up to two for to 4% of our strength.
And then at the age 60 that. Doubles. [00:04:10] So what I decided was I’m gonna put some really cool new fitness goals in and do things that take me out of my comfort zone. Like I will tell you in two days I’m going to do goat yoga. Yes, stay tuned on that. We’ve been doing all sorts of stuff. I took up rucking.
I’ve been lifting way heavier weights. So that was one. And then I really set some relationship goals of who, you know, when you start to look at this, you go, who are [00:04:35] the people that I really want to spend time with? You know, who and how do I get to make sure that I’m spending more time with my family?
And how do I make sure I’m getting to spend that really good quality time with my heavy. Now I also set, set spiritual goals and think about what you would love to continue, you know, how would you like to continue to grow? Someone asked me the other day, like, what was my, how are things working so well with my husband?
What would I, would I give for my, you [00:05:00] know, relationship success? And I say, because we’re always working on new personal development goals. And doing cool new things like going to a Dr. Joe Dispenza event. We go to a Transformation Leadership council. We’re always working, reading a book together. So what can you do for spiritual goals to continue to push you outta your comfort zone?
And by the way, all of these things, all these new experiences are focused on getting me outta my comfort zone. Now, the [00:05:25] pleasure of hearing Steven Kotler talk about this recently and his new book, Nara Country, and he talks about. Pushing yourself in new activities and, and again, it can be so. Easy to get into a rut, right?
I mean, that is, that is the thing that I’m fighting against is getting into a rut. So I’ve been really working on these new activities. So I’m gonna walk through some of the things that I’ve [00:05:50] done to see if they inspire you as well, because I’ve really doubled down on wellness. And self-care. And I think one of the things that happens when we’re 40 plus is we have to really take care of our nervous system.
And so I actually started to gamify my self-care and I got over this whole guilty feeling of like, oh my gosh, I’m taking a hot bath and I’m not working. I got over that. Okay, so the first thing that I did, And I’m, and I’m actually going to [00:06:15] do another one in a week as I did a deep dive assessment on, by using a dxa so that I could look at my skeletal muscle, I could look at my bones and my bone mineral density, and then I could look at my fat mass, my vat fat, and my, and again, what I really wanna make sure is that right now I’m focused on putting on as much.
Muscle as humanly possible. Now at home, I have a bioimpedance scale and a tape measure, [00:06:40] but what I did was I set some really ambitious goals for myself in terms of resistance training and lifting really heavy weights and even adding in some things like agility training and biometric stuff. Not fun, I will tell you.
Not fun at all, but boy, I’m really seeing the benefits of it and it’s fun to start challenging again. The other thing that I’ve been focusing on is sleep. And I will tell you that I [00:07:05] genetically am not a good deep sleeper. It’s a big challenge for me, and when I like. Did 23 me and every genetic test comes out and goes, you’re not a good deep sleeper.
I’m like, no kidding. What I have to do to really help with that. Cus any little thing, wine before bed messed up, deep sleep, you know, any kind of tech before bed messed up, deep sleep. So, um, one of the things that I stopped doing in preparation for all this was I was got into a habit of drinking more wine than I should have.
[00:07:30] And now I drink one to three glasses a week. I really cut it way back and save it for special. Like if we’re going out to dinner or we’re with friends. But I’ve really been focusing on my. Sleep and working on, you know, I travel now with always with an eye mask. Earplugs and those little stickers to cover all the lights because that’s a problem.
So that’s the next thing. Now, one of the other things that I’ve been working on, and I think this is a shift that happens [00:07:55] in your forties or fifties, is that realization that you are gonna need more self-care. Like to get to the place where it was easy in the twenties or thirties, need more self-care.
And I had to get over some of the guilt of like, Taking that time for myself. So what I’ve done to do it is gamified it and gotten into some routines, but I found at night that my routine was I didn’t have a specific routine. So what I did instead was give myself self-care [00:08:20] points. So I wanna earn at least three self-care points a day.
Here’s what counts as a self-care. The cold plunge meditation, working out journaling, reading a positive book, a personal development book, taking a hot Epson salts bath, doing my red lights, using my sunlight and sauna, going for a walk after dinner. So, All of those things count. And when I do [00:08:45] it now, I just say I have to, I’m, my goal is to get three a day or 21 a week.
So if I miss a day, then I can back it up onto the next, but I’m finding I’m getting more like four or five cuz I’m tend to be an overachiever. So try that one. If you’re having trouble, like getting that stable routine. Now one night I sauna. No one night I walk. But I find that’s been really, really easy now in terms of my workout.
The first thing that I did was really assess where I was at and I did a grip strength. I got a hand [00:09:10] dynamometer grip dynamometer. I did my grip strength, and I checked how many pushups that I could do. And what I really worked on was how many pushups could I hold? And another thing that you could do at home is you can do either a one mile walk test, you can do a 12 minute cardio test, but you wanna do something where you can really see.
How your cardio is doing, because I know for me, one of the things I had to like deal with was that [00:09:35] I will, I love to do resistance training. But I don’t love yoga and I don’t really like cardio. So I had to really get serious with myself of getting my cardio built into my schedule. Cause I will blow it off given the opportunity won’t blow off my weights, I’ll blow off my cardio cause I don’t really like it.
So I really measured that now and I put some goals in there for my. Self ditto on my balance and flexibility cuz when you [00:10:00] think about fitness as we age and what’s interesting when you age, the biggest hallmarks of aging, like there’s now 12, but 11 of the 12 exercise improves. It’s the only thing that is like the universal thing that’s helping all of this exercise.
And so I looked at where I might have a deficit because when you look at, um, what fitness is, it’s balance, in fact, like if you look at the statistics, here are the things that [00:10:25] they look at that increase all cause mortality, inability to balance on one leg, um, poor muscle grip strength, uh, slow gate, right?
But the things you look at are balanced. Flexibility, strength, stamina, and agility. And what I found was now that I’ve been doing yoga, at least now I’m not mad at the teacher for making me balance. Now I understand why I’m doing it. So balance, I’m now working on [00:10:50] flexibility. I’m working on through yoga too, cause I kind of blew that off.
But agility in cardio, I had to put back in the agility. When I lived in, um, Palm Springs, I used to do a lot more hiking and hit training, and now I’m here and there’s no mountains in Florida, so I’ve gotta get more of that in. So I’ve been doing more hit through my StairMaster in Peloton, and I’ve been adding in some jump training and agility training into my weight [00:11:15] workouts.
So that’s what I’m doing. So I’m really working on mixing it up. Again in my resistance training, I added in some agility. I added in some sprint training. I started rotating in. Between different sets and reps, because strength training tends to be, you’ll get the most strength when you do lower reps, like one to five reps.
Heavy, heavy weight. You’ll get the [00:11:40] best hypertrophy when you do a little longer, like eight to 15 reps. And each of these things you really want to get towards failure and you get more stamina when you start to get like 20, 30 and keep going. And so what I’ve been doing is rotating around and I also stopped my fasted workouts.
I started eating an hour before I went and worked out, and I’ve increased my strength 30%, which is. Wild. Now my cardio, in addition, in doing my hit and doing my [00:12:05] walking after dinner, I’ve also added in rucking. And that is where you put a vest on a weighted vest. This is a super cool thing because it instantly adds more workload and it’s also great for your skeleton because it’s putting stress on your bone.
So that’s a super cool thing. And again, I’m doing yoga at least once a week. Um, and I will tell you between you and me, like I count every minute in there. It’s not something I love. But I’m working on [00:12:30] it and I’m also working on trying some new sports. Super important. Now, what about diet? Here’s the other thing I did.
As I was turning 60, I decided I was gonna track my macros to make sure that I’m getting the protein I need, because of course, as we age, we get anabolic resistance. So, We need more protein, not less. So I’ve been, my goal is 150 grams a day, divided into three meals. So you know, 30 to 50 grams in a meal.
But basically I’m hitting about 50 of each meal. [00:12:55] And the other thing I put in as a goal was to have really good diversity of my non-search vegetables and fruit. And I actually was not really good about eating fruits. I’ve been getting two fruits a day and I’ve been getting like about 10 servings of non-starchy vegetables a day.
And that’s really for microbiome, which I’ll do another test on to see how that goes. And I’ve also been really good at doing enzymes. And what I discovered by doing all that and tracking my macros is I actually feel better with a little [00:13:20] less fat. And I’ve pretty much been sticking with protein. Lots of non-starchy vegetables, little fruit and little fat.
And I feel better and I’ll cycle the carbs up a little bit if I’m working super duper hard. Um, so that’s another thing I’ve been doing. But generally, I don’t eat much in the way of the starer carbs. I might do that once a week. Now the other thing that’s made a huge difference, I’ve always been taking something called Jerol jal.
[00:13:45] It’s a super interesting supplement. Um, that can help with bone density, help with hormone production. It’s on the pathway that your body has to make coq 10, so it’s higher up on the chain, helps you make, um, hormones, helps you with bone density, helps you with hot flashes. So I started that, but then I did two things that I think have made a big, big difference between that and the enzymes.
Cause when I look at [00:14:10] aging, I say, Gigi, Definitely cocuten, definitely enzymes to help digest your protein and fat. But there’s two other things that I started that I know made a massive difference. One of them was creatine, monohydrate, and I think any one 40 plus should be on creatine, especially if you’re a woman.
Cuz 70 to 80% lower creatinine in women, and especially if you’re a vegan, like should be like. You know, it’s mission critical. Should be absolutely essential. [00:14:35] So that’s the first one. I do five grams of that a day. And the other one I started was something called Mire by Timeline Nutrition, which is a something called olien a.
And your gut ideally makes Olien A from, from pomegranate and some of the other polyphenols. But turns out that very few of us do it, like 30% of us can actually make that. And what’s so important about this is that this helps your body do something [00:15:00] called mi autophagy. Now, you probably heard about autophagy, which is why we do, we throw in little cycles of intermittent fasting.
Like once a week I’ll do a sh very shortened fin feeding window to do more autophagy, which exercise does as well, which really helps you get rid of some of the damaged cells. My top G is getting rid of the damaged. Cells in your mitochondria, which is super important. And what this, um, company showed is that this product could help [00:15:25] increase strength as much as 21% in just six weeks.
So I’ve been doing this product and creatine. I think they have made a massive difference cuz I started to realize, you know, I’ve gotta really focus on building muscle right now because, you know, In your seventies, eighties, nineties, it’s gets, just gets more and more difficult to do this. And again, in our forties and fifties, we start losing muscle if we’re not actively fighting against it.
And that doubles in your sixties. So this [00:15:50] is really the time to go. We are going to build muscle. And the way I see it is aging is a privilege, right? And my mission is to help you make the most of it mentally and physically. So if you were still figuring out how to navigate your. Forties, your fifties, your sixties, and you’re struggling with weight gain, hormones and other stressors.
I want you to bookmark my playlist on aging to keep updated with my latest videos on how to eat, how to move, and how to live well as you get [00:16:15] older. 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 more importantly that you’re built to last.
And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and my website jj virgin.com and make sure. Sure to follow my podcast so you don’t miss a single [email protected]. See you next time.[00:16:40]

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