I’m J. J. Virgin, Ph. D. dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. 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 most of all. By my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can.

And that’s where you come in. 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 powerful 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, don’t miss an episode. Subscribe [email protected] to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Today we’re diving deep into the transformative journey of someone who didn’t just change his health.

He re wrote his entire life’s story. Ben Azadi is a health entrepreneur, a four times bestselling author, and the go to source for intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet for over a decade. But before he became a powerhouse in the health and wellness space, Ben was battling his own demons. Obesity.

Depression. And even thoughts of giving up on life. Welcome to Well Beyond 40, where we’re all about giving you the tools and info to live your healthiest, most vibrant life. At just 23 years old, Ben weighed over 250 pounds with 34 percent body fat. Stuck in a cycle of emotional pain and physical struggles, he was at rock bottom.

But a pivotal shift in mindset Turned his life around completely over the next nine months. He lost 80 and went from someone ready to give up on himself to becoming a vibrant advocate for metabolic health and mental resilience today. Ben shares how he used. Mindset as the cornerstone for lasting change, the power of metabolic flexibility, and why he believes that your greatest struggles can become your superpowers.

If you’ve ever felt stuck or unsure of where to start on your own health journey, Ben’s story and insights will leave you feeling inspired and ready to take action. Let’s dive in.

All right, Ben Azzotti. I got you in person.

We’re here in person.

Yay. It’s just so much better in person. And I’ve been wanting to dig into metabolic flexibility. I feel like it’s something that people are very confused about and the terms just thrown around. So, um, we’re going to talk about that, but before we do.

How did you get into all of this?

Yeah, well, first of all, it’s an honor. I’ve been a huge fan and admirer of you for so many years, so thank you for having me.

Go ahead.

It’s true. I’ve studied you for many years, so it’s an honor to be here. I got into the space in 2007. I was 23 years old, very young. I was physically obese, 250 pounds, high percent body fat, about 34 percent body fat.

Broken, broken. I was actually ready to give up on life. I was going through a bad breakup and although I was smiling in front of my friends, I would go home, go on the internet. Look for ways to end my life. I was that depressed and suicidal. So, um, I explored that and every time I explored suicide, the first thought that came in my mind was, What about your mom?

Thank you. I was just going to say, but what about

mom? What about your mom was the first thought and it was a reoccurring thought. So that was the only reason that stopped me. From actually pursuing that. So I knew I had to figure things out. And it really started with a mindset change. I started to get into the books of like Dr.

Wayne Dyer and Bob Proctor. And I changed my mindset, started to change myself, image of myself. Then I started to move my body, started to exercise. And I went through this incredible transformation where I lost 80 pounds in nine months, went from 34 percent body fat to 6 percent body fat in nine months in nine months.

Yeah.

You know, I just have to point something out because you said something. That is super important and profound. You said, I changed my mindset. I changed my image of myself. And then,

yeah.

So people think it’s the opposite and it actually doesn’t work the other way. You just get yourself back to where you were again.

So you first changed it in your mind and then you made that shift and that’s a quick shift.

But you

were also a little spring chicken. I

was young, so it was a lot easier. And I’m a guy, so that, that, I had that

too. I, um, although my husband went from 25 percent body fat to 10 percent body fat in eight months.

Wow. At

59. That’s

impressive. So, yes.

That’s pretty damn good. He was a

very good student. He finally listened. All right. So you went through this process. Then what happened?

So that’s what got me into the health space. I became a personal trainer and eventually opened up a CrossFit gym in Miami. Operated that for many years.

Yeah. From 2013, 2018. Sold the shares in 2018. And then I started to just go online, write books, create podcasts, YouTube channel, that’s when I came across your work, probably around 2016 or so is when I probably came across your work, but that’s what got me into this space. But yeah, it started with the mindset shift.

I started with the self image that I needed to recreate for myself. Cause my self image, JJ was. An obese, sad, broke man.

And had you been obese your whole life? My

whole life.

Oh, yeah. And, and, uh, you know, I did this when I was on Dr. Phil, I was doing all these weight loss challenges, but we took on the kids.

And I still remember Dr. Phil saying, you know, an obese kid, 70 percent likelihood they’ll be an obese adult. And some of it’s the metabolic changes, but a lot of it is. Just they believe that this is who they are, their identity. I’ve seen it time and time again in doing weight loss for 40 years is you get people to a certain point and if they don’t embody it and get it and they’re there in their mind, they just snap back.

They’ll find a way to get back to their self image. That’s exactly it. So for me, it wasn’t just the obesity. It was the mental obesity with the depression, suicidal thoughts. And I had addictions to drugs and video games and sugar and alcohol. You know, I have a unique thought on addiction and I’d love to share it and kind of get your thoughts on it real quick.

Uh, I’ve always been told I have an addictive personality, even like my genetics show you’re prone to addiction and I’ve always kind of suffered with addictive personality or bad addictions. However, when I started to lose weight and get healthy and get clear on goals and start goal setting and get inspired by that, I feel like I use the addiction as a superpower to transfer into something that was worthwhile for me.

Where now. All the energy that I was putting into my addiction, which we put a lot of energy into our addictions. It’s like a superpower for me. And as long as I keep setting goals and I keep pursuing those goals, healthy goals, that’s turned into a superpower for me.

And see, I absolutely a hundred percent agree with framing anything.

You know, people talk, I’ve got ADD. I go, that can be a superpower, you know, bipolar. My son’s got bipolar. I go, do you realize that? When I lived, you know, and worked in Hollywood, every single creative person had bipolar disorder, they all did, you know, you go in a room full of entrepreneurs, everyone’s got ADHD, I go, what if these things actually were to benefit you, but we framed them and made them a disease and made them something awful when they might be the greatest thing that could possibly happen.

That’s right. Used the right way. It’s like, what is that? With great power comes great responsibility. Spider Man, right? Spider Man, wise words from Spider Man. Yes.

That’s what I did. And I feel like it’s a superpower for me now. It’s a victim mindset to identify yourself with something that’s holding you back.

Yes. Well, there are no victims, only volunteers. That is right.

Tony Robbins has said that before. You

know, it’s so funny, I went deep into mindset training at 30. And I actually moved to, it was when I moved to Florida. And I moved to Florida to learn how to build a successful business, but I didn’t know I was going to be learning.

Mindset training. And it was all of listening to Wayne Dyer and all of that stuff. And you realize it just changes everything. And, you know, I think of it in terms of aging. Now, the study that came out that showed the people who were excited and positive about aging live seven and a half years longer, you know, and then you look around you and you go, everything is infectious.

So like you said, with addiction and the negative, everything’s infectious. So if you’re around healthy people, that’s infectious. If you’re around people who are whining, complaining, and victims, that’s infectious. What are you going to magnetize to you? Right? So, so now you’re 6 percent body fat. You’re a personal trainer.

You had a cry. I had a gym too. Very glad. I don’t have a gym anymore. You had a gym, you sold that, you went online and here you are.

And here I am. Yeah. So, you know, along the way I started to get into keto, intermittent fasting, started a company called Keto Camp, uh, really dominated the keto field. And I learned a lot of lessons, you know, being dogmatic about keto in the beginning.

We’re all dogmatic when we start. Yeah. You’re excited and it’s like, Oh, this works.

This is the only thing.

Be on this. Exactly.

Right. So that’s a big piece to metabolic flexibility, but it’s not the only piece. It’s, it’s one tool in the shed. And I just love teaching about the metabolism in the new book.

Metabolic freedom is all about that. And chapter 10 is all about how to use your thoughts to influence your metabolism and heal your body, which talks about the self image. It talks about different stories and studies on how people have used their mind to change their health.

Well, I’m a big Dr. Joe Dispenza devotee too.

So, you know, I’ve seen it with my own eyes so many times. All right. Well, let’s dig into metabolism first. Burst. Metabolism. What is metabolism?

It could be really complicated if we want it to be, right? Um, the Greeks define it as transform. So we take sub, a substrate. So that could be protein, carbohydrates, fat.

Our own body fat. These are all substrates and we transform it into energy. Essentially, that’s what metabolism is. You take a substrate, transform it into energy. The problem, JJ, is that about 88 percent to 93 percent of Americans have taught their metabolism to only burn sugar as the substrate. And they’re stuck burning sugar and only sugar.

And there’s nothing wrong with burning sugar unless you’re only burning sugar all the time. It’s going to age you faster. It’s going to lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. So The goal is to teach your metabolism, to use whatever substrate is available. That could be carbohydrates and sugar. That’s great for most people.

They have forgotten how to burn fat and use ketones. They’re essentially in a keto deficiency. So that’s usually the first step of what I teach people is to get them fat adapted to teach their metabolism, to burn fat instead of sugar. We’re designed to burn fat babies that are born into this world and breastfed are actually in a state of ketosis.

They go in and out of ketosis. Breast milk has saturated fat, cholesterol, and there is some sugar, but it naturally burns that and goes in and out. But we get off the breast milk, we start eating a standard American diet, and we’re stuck burning sugar for the rest of our lives. So the first step is to teach the metabolism to burn fat.

And we don’t have to be stuck. In case you heard that one, Oh no, we’re not stuck. Um, right. Yeah, I look at it as the continuum of being able to burn the right fuel, the most efficient fuel, the most effective fuel. Like right now, We’re sitting here. We should be using mainly fat. We’re hanging out. But you know, earlier today I went and did a big workout and then I, and it was funny.

I actually wore a CGM for a while to the gym because I wanted to see how high I could get my blood sugar to go. Of course, the guys over at the, at the company were like, what are you doing over there? I go, I am pushing it really hard and I’m using the CGM. And a lumen as an indicator, because that’s when you should be using more sugar.

So it’s really, what are we, what’s the best fuel for the job and how much can you shift back and forth? That’s when I look at metabolic flexibility. Is that how you would

think

of

it? It’s exactly it. Right. So what we see now in the keto space, and I lecture at a lot of keto conferences and sometimes most of the time, other keto speakers don’t really love my message because my message is yes.

Keto amazing. There’s so many amazing benefits and we could dive deep into all of that. But it’s not what you do forever. You don’t stay in continuous ketosis. It’s about going in and out. So in the keto space, there’s a different form of metabolic inflexibility, and that’s only burning fat and they forgot how to burn sugar.

So when they eat carbohydrates, there’s this overproduction of insulin. They go hypoglycemic. So that’s not metabolic flexibility. Metabolic flexibility, as you mentioned, is being able to burn sugar when you want to, or burn fat and go back and forth without any problem.

Yeah. And I look at it and I think of diets as tools.

Not religions, , you know, not dog mug, but, and I have to say that because being in the nutrition space and the fitness space, yeah. I mean, it used to be that like the runners would fight with the yoga instructors and now it’s the vegans fighting with the carnivores. And I’m like, what if everybody’s right?

And what if it’s just what’s right for you right now? And maybe the thing that’s going to heal you and improve you and move you into metabolic flexibility isn’t the thing that you need to do long term, or maybe you need to cycle it. So it’s just a different way to think of these things. I think this idea there’s one thing that we should be doing.

This is obviously silly. This is true. Yes. So. Someone coming in cause we know that the majority of our population’s not metabolically healthy. Um, and I just wonder, cause as far as I can tell from the stats, they really haven’t done a deep dive on this post pandemic. So I mean it post pandemic. Excluding the GLP 1 people would be interesting to look at and see what’s really happened here.

But taking someone walking in who’s metabolically unhealthy, meaning they are more insulin resistant, so they’re having trouble accessing stored fat per fuel, they’re really relying on Having to use sugar, where would you take them? What would you do?

So the first step is to look at the three macronutrients, right?

Keep it simple for them. We know it’s carbohydrates out of the three macronutrients that spike glucose and insulin the most. Of course, processed carbs will spike it more than a whole foods carbs. But if a person is insulin resistant, we need to restrict their carbohydrates, at least in the beginning. As we increase protein, one of your favorite macronutrients and fat, right?

We want to teach that metabolism to switch over to from burning sugar to burning fat for most people, they could get away with 50 grams of carbs per day total to make that shift. Now, if somebody is really insulin resistant, maybe type two diabetic. They might need to restrict it to under 20 grams of carbs per day.

This is just short term, maybe for six to 12 weeks as the metabolism is now getting familiar with burning fat. That’s the first step we do that. We eliminate the snacking. We just do three meals a day.

I said, you’re, you’re, you’re a young guy and I know when snacking came about because we were raised not to snack and snacking happened when the whole fat free thing

happened.

The low fat craze in

the eighties. This whole thing blew up. So eighties and everything became fat free and then you were supposed to graze.

And now we’re still stuck with that. Well, and

you can still, you can see what happened to her. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. The, everything went sideways from that moment, from when that whole thing happened and there was a big influencer, Susan powder who had lost all this weight, eating fat free and, you know, screaming stopped the insanity.

It was, I mean, it was actually, you look back, it’s like, there’s so many memes you could do over, but. It created such a mess and the snacking piece of it. It’s

a big problem.

Yeah. You know, I think, did you hear the Satchin Panda thing where we eat like 14 hours a day and like some like every hour or some ridiculous.

Yeah, it’s crazy.

There’s another study that my colleague, Dr. Don Clumb did where it was a patient population survey. He had hundreds of patients just write down every time they either ate a meal or snacked. Right. So anytime they ate or snacked and it was on average 17 to 23 times per day, the average person was eating 17 to 23 times per day.

They were just grazing, snacking, and of course eating their meals. That’s a glucose spike and insulin spike every single time throughout the day. It’s like, it’s not even a spike.

You’re just keeping it

up. You’re just

topping it off and pushing it up and topping it up. That’s what I always looked at snacking.

I went, all right, You ate, your blood sugar came up, your insulin came up, your blood sugar is trying to come down, but the minute it’s trying, you eat again. It’s like insulin is never going down, blood sugar is probably never going down, you just kept it all up. And you saw, I think, that there was a study that showed people that even with a 90 of fasting blood sugar, 5x of the dementia risk.

Wow. So, this is like Yeah. It’s scary stuff.

Can I just add something to that? Here’s the crazy thing about just looking at blood sugars, even fasting post meal and a one C it’s the insulin that’s going to rise before. Right. So there’s a study called the white hall study, which showed that the average person could have hyperinsulinemia for about 14 years while their blood sugars and a one C look perfect.

Yeah,

but they have insulin resistance.

This makes me nuts. I, so this is how I look at these things to me. Bone mineral density issues, like look at your muscle mass, blood sugar issues. Look at your insulin. Like we’re, we’re missing the lagging indicator. Like we’re looking way over at bone mineral density or we’re looking at fasting blood sugar.

When, if we just looked at fasting insulin, like why are we not testing this? It’s one

of the most important tests. It’s

crazy

and it’s cheap. Even if your insurance doesn’t cover, it’s like 30 or 50 bucks. It’s very cheap.

We had, way back when we had this gal, we were doing teenagers on Dr. Phil and this gal came in and she couldn’t lose weight and she was like, six five, this poor girl.

So she was super tall and and obese. And I’m like, did anyone check her fasting? Insulin seemed like an obvious thing to me, which was, it was over 20. And of course the, then I got yelled at cause I’m not a doctor. I’m like, I didn’t say I didn’t, I didn’t. Diagnose it. I just said, check it. Check. Right. Like, you know, the mom’s like, thank God, but these are things that are cheap.

Like fasting insulin, super cheap test. It’s cheap. And it’s like that and vitamin D insist on them.

Yes. And if it’s 22, for example, if this girl was 22, the reference range shows that it’s in range at 22. But if you’re over 10, You’ve got insulin resistance. You want to be in the single

digits. Yeah, exactly.

I stay three pretty much year round when I test mine. So you want to be two to five, three to seven around there. Single digits is the name of the game for fasting insulin.

Yeah. Imagine if we had a little thing where we had uric acid, vitamin D. The things, the important things. There

were these at home uric acid meters that they now ban.

You can’t use them anymore. They put regulations on it. You can’t even prick your finger and check uric acid anymore.

God knows what would you do with that information? I

know you might get healthy and get off your medication. Oh no.

That’s so crazy. Okay. So someone comes in, you take them through this. Um, and I would assume that someone who is putting exercise in, it’s just going to make this thing happen so much faster because they can get their insulin sensitivity from their resistance training and get their.

So once you see that shift and how are you identifying, you know, that they’ve made the shift, are you seeing it? Ketones. Are you checking blood sugar? Like, what are you doing to know? Oh, you, you got to where we needed to go. You’re, you’re able to burn fat for fuel.

Definitely looking at blood glucose and ketones.

I like to, I like to use a keto mojo or any kind of device looking at the tell everyone

what a keto mojo

is a, it’s an at home device that you use to prick your finger. You draw a little blood and then you put a strip of a piece of blood on the strip for glucose, put into the machine, gives you a reading, use the same blood for a ketone strip and it gives you a reading.

That’s a good gauge. I mean, once you hit 0. 5, excuse me, 0. 5 or higher on your ketone reading, uh, millimoles per liter, you’re burning fat instead of sugar. You’re in ketosis. Then we want to look at your blood sugars. I like looking at post prandial blood sugars as a good metric as, as well. If I, if I Because

it’s functional.

Yeah, exactly. Right? Versus just fasting blood sugar, which is great. But I like to look at that. And if we see that start to trend in the right directions, the ketones are rising. Week by week, the glucose is getting better, especially post prandially, uh, prandially. That means we are seeing a good response.

Now we could retest the fasting insulin as well, but typically about eight to 12 weeks, JJ, that person is now keto adapted. We’re now their mitochondria are really efficient at using ketones and we can make a decision and we want to start what I call flexing out of ketosis and going back in at that point.

Okay. So how do you do that?

The flex part. So it’ll be different for men versus women. And that’s especially diabetic. The

dudes have it easy. Yeah. There you go. Those

women. So women of menstrual years or post menopause or both.

Basically perimenopause and up the perimenopause super fun time. You try to do any kind of intervention.

And then after that, so

that’s easy. There’s a, there’s something called the five one, one rule that I talk about in a metabolic freedom and it’s a way to use keto flexing. So essentially. It’s five days out of the week. You’re doing keto. You’re eating keto friendly meals, focused on protein.

And so that’s 50 grams of carbs or less.

Yeah, total.

And you’re

basically getting that, I would assume just from non starchy vegetables. Yes,

that is exactly. That’s it. So green leafy vegetables, non starchy vegetables for five days, hitting your protein target, which is one gram of protein per pound of your ideal body weight, then one day out of the week.

And it depends on the woman here and how much stress she has, but one day out of the week, you might perform a 24 hour fast. Where you just go breakfast to breakfast or lunch to lunch or dinner to dinner. Again, it depends on how much stress that woman has. The final day, which is the second one in the 5 1 1, is a keto flex day.

Where you do not fast. You actually take your total carbs above 150 grams coming from healthy carbohydrates. Still hitting your protein requirement, but you’re lowering your fat that day. You don’t want a high carb day and a high fat day. So that’s one variation called the 5 1 1 rule of how to practice keto flexing.

And what does that do for someone? So it helps you maintain metabolic flexibility. It reminds your body that one day that you’re getting out of ketosis. It reminds your metabolism. There’s different fuel sources. There’s carbohydrates and sugar. We haven’t forgotten how to burn that. Let’s burn that. It helps to make hormonal conversions.

T4 thyroid inactive T4 to T3 insulin helps with that. Uh, it helps to build progesterone and estrogen for ladies who have a menstrual cycle, which of course the week before the period would be a good week to have more of those flex days. So just makes hormonal conversions and JJ prevents. Or helps you overcome a weight loss plateau.

Cause it reminds your body that you’re not in a famine. You’re not in a ketogenic state, which is more like extreme times. There’s an abundance of fuel here, burn that for a day. And then the next day you go back into ketosis. So it reminds the body and the metabolism. It’s not starving.

I love cycling. And I like Bill Campbell.

Um, who have, I’m such a big fan of the fact that he is doing all this research now on menopausal women.

Smart guy. So awesome. He’s here in your area too. He is.

Yeah. He came on, uh, came over to the house. So we’re doing this podcast live and my dog has fallen in love with him and she is like on him. She’s on his shoulder.

I’m like, sorry. You know, he’s like, it’s okay. I’m like, all right. Now I really like you. You’re just a good guy. Um, but yeah, his wife started going through menopause, so he’s been deep in it, which is fantastic. But the way that he does his, uh, diet is he does five days on two days maintenance, five days on, so he’ll caloric restrict and then go into maintenance, which, you know, I’d love to see more studies cause I really feel like it would also, these things would also help you not have the metabolic adaptation we so often see.

Of course, having more muscle mass would help too. So, Someone who’s now flexible, they can use all the different fuels. Do you keep them on keto or do you let them do whatever feels best to them?

I wouldn’t keep them on keto. I mean, they, there could be a portion of the week that they could be in ketosis.

Like you mentioned. We’re doing a podcast now, we’re using a lot of energy and bandwidth. I’m in ketosis. I haven’t eaten today. I drove up from Miami. So on a day like this, like that’s a good keto day, right? But on a day that you’re training heavy, like you did this morning, maybe it’s not a good keto day.

So you would kind of adjust it according to your lifestyle, but it’s important to maintain this metabolic freedom and flexibility by having some keto days, by having some caloric deficit days, and then having some caloric surplus feast days as well. I think that’s important.

Yeah. It’s funny, last night we went to Burns Steakhouse.

It’s one of my girlfriends, she’ll meet’s birthday. So, and then we ended up, so Burns has the dessert room. Have you ever been to Burns? I have not. Uh, Burns, for everybody listening, is like the, one of the top steakhouses in the country. And they have a dessert room. Which, we took, every time we’d go to dinner there, we’re like, yeah, no, we’re not going to the dessert room.

Then we had our kids, so we took them up. And it’s these train, like they’re little, it looks like you’re in these high end train cars. And these most ridiculous desserts. So last night we go to dinner, you know, and I love steak houses because we literally get the same like bone in New York with mushrooms and I’m good to go.

Um, and then we’re like, well, we’re going to the dessert room. It’s her birthday. And I thought about it later because I was like, I can’t even think of the last time I actually had something like this. And it’s like, and, and I said to my husband this morning, I go, I never want to be that person who’s like, Oh no, I cannot have any of these things.

I go, isn’t the reason we’re doing all of these things so that we can occasionally go and eat literally the Elvis Sunday.

What’s that? Yeah. Tell

me about that. J. J. Sunday was banana ice cream, peanut butter, ice cream. And I don’t know what the third one was with bacon. Wow. Remember that banana, peanut butter, bacon sandwich.

That’s

what it’s about. It was based on that

sandwich made as a Sunday. Oh my

gosh. That was

one of the three desserts. That was one of the three.

So American.

Uh, it was hilarious. I’m like, well, of course we have to have the Elvis Sunday. Like, of course, but we also, I looked at the whole thing and I go, we probably ate about a third of each of them between four of us.

And it’s like, all right, you know, I better be able to do those things with all that we’re doing. And I think that’s an important message. I know we’re going to talk some about some of these things out there, like seed oils, but I also. I’ve heard people go, I never go to dinner. I never go out to eat because I don’t want to have seed oils.

And I go, I’m making my body resilient so that if occasionally these things come in, I’m not going to like keel over.

And I think

that’s really the point of all of this.

I agree. I enjoy myself too. Sundays are my day for that, by the way. It’s my day where I just enjoy myself. I don’t restrict myself.

What’s

that look like? Let’s live vicariously few.

I’ll have about 400 to 500 grams of carbs on a Sunday.

Wow.

It’s a lot of carbs. Uh, I am active on a day. I play a couple, a couple hours of basketball with friends every Sunday as well. So I am active, but a lot of white rice, a lot of fruit, sweet potatoes and ice cream as well.

That’s what I do. And I have a. A ton of carbs on that day, but by Monday I’m back into ketosis, right? That’s metabolic flexibility. Yeah.

It’s funny. We played one game one night. It was like, what’s your last meal? And no one was allowed to judge. Of course. And I said, maybe popcorn and everyone judged me.

And I go, guys, come on. All right. Well, let’s dig into some of the myths around ketosis. Cause I, and I’ll throw out one that, that drives me nuts is people like, Oh, I can eat all this cause I’m burning fat. I go, you’re not burning your body fat. You know, if you like load up on fat, you got to burn that first.

So what are some of the things that you would love to bust here on this?

The first one is that keto is not even a diet. It’s a metabolic process. And a lot of people look at it, keto diet for fat loss, keto diet for fat loss. And it can be one way to use it, but. It’s more of a metabolic process that’s been around forever.

All humans have used ketosis. All our ancestors ancestors have used ketosis when there was not food available. Their body needed the ability, their metabolism needed to have that ability to shift to fat burning, produce ketones, to fuel the brain so they could stay alert, hunt, kill, and stay alive. Um, so it’s nothing new about keto.

It’s just nuanced or new to some people. So that’s the first myth I want to debunk right there. The second one, I like what you just said about. The high fat diet, right? It can be a high fat diet and most people do it that way because when they go on Google and type in What are the macronutrients for ketosis?

It’s about like 80 percent fat 15 percent protein and 5 percent carbs So they think they need to hit that fat percentage, right? And maybe in the beginning like the first seven days that might do well as you lower carbs You could introduce a bunch of fat but to your point Your body needs to burn the calories and the fat that you’re consuming before it burns your body fat.

So the way I teach it, very similar to what you would teach, is to have lower fat, get the fat that comes with the protein, hit your protein and keep the carbs under 50 grams so your metabolism is tapping into stored body fat.

Yeah, and it’s, I mean, the reality is if you’re eating animal protein, you’re getting fat.

That’s right. So the carbs are the ones that don’t come along with fat. Everything in nature that’s animal protein has fat with it. This is true.

So there’s no need to even track fat, track your carbs and track your protein, hit your protein requirement, keep her carbs under 50 grams.

And the other side of that is if you’re eating animal protein and I think you should, you know, choose lean, it’s like get clean, choose lean.

Um, unless you’re getting great, great, great, clean fish, go for it. Um, and then you’re making vegetables and likely you’re using some ghee or olive oil or some things, right? So when you really get through it, you’re like, do you really need to add any fat? I mean, that was when I really started tracking and weighing, I went, Oh, I’m good.

You know, no, I don’t need to sit there with the olive oil bottle turned upside down on top of my stuff, like, oh yeah, that never, well, I was, Dave’s a good friend. I was like, make mine really light. I could never handle all the fat in the coffee. It was like, no, too much.

It’s a myth. You don’t need to do that.

All right. Let your body burn its own body fat for its fat source. Yeah. Especially if you have extra weight.

Yeah. So, all right. So any other myths around this?

Um, another myth is that men and women do it the same and that’s not absolutely true. As you know, men have more of a 24 hour recycling pattern for their hormones.

Menstruating women have more of a 28 day pattern and menstruating and post menopause are closer to the men who with 24 hour recycling pattern. So it’s done differently. Uh, ketosis is a stress to the body. It’s, it’s a beneficial stress, a hormetic stress. When done the right way, it stresses your mitochondria to actually create more mitochondria and create more energy.

But if you do it too aggressively for too long, then you lose this hormetic curve or the benefits you were getting are now becoming drawbacks. So you don’t want to do it for too long. It’s a tool, but not the only tool.

And where I’ve used it in the past is either been to break someone free of insulin resistance.

Or cancer or seizures. Those are like, to me, the three big applications. Are we missing any?

No, that’s, that works really well. Or, uh, if somebody has a weight loss stall and they want to change things up, be a little bit aggressive for a little bit with ketosis, which is a very low carbohydrate diet, it could work really well for that.

Um, another myth is that all keto fats Are created equal, like just because something is keto friendly, uh, it should be, uh, healthy, but that is not true. And arguably with the seed oil thing and the bad fats, more people in the keto space are consuming these bad fats than maybe people outside of the keto space, because they’re focusing on a high fat diet and typically they’re eating a ton of these rancid fats, these seed oils.

So yeah, just because it’s keto friendly doesn’t mean it’s health friendly.

I, the whole keto food, ultra processed food thing reminds me of gluten. So I, when I first started pulling people off gluten, I remember this one gal came back and she was so pleased with herself cause she’d found all this gluten free junk food.

I was like, I, why are you eating cupcakes and cookies? We weren’t eating these before. Now you found gluten free ones and you’re eating all this garbage. Stop it. And you see the same thing in the it’s keto and you look at it and you’re like, what is. This let’s dig in, you know, I, I’d love to hear what you think about seed oils.

Um, because I kind of, well, let’s see what you say. And then I’m going to kind of see some of the things I’m thinking about with them. So first tell everyone what they are.

So seed oils are classified also as vegetable oils, also linoleic acid. These are omega six fats. I’m going to start by saying that.

not all seed oils are bad for you. Not all omega six fats are bad for you. Actually healthy seed oils and healthy omega six fats are crucial for the cell membrane.

Yeah, they’re essential. They’re

essential. Yeah. So it’s not that all seed oils are bad. Now there are a lot of clips out there, especially with me talking about seed oils and it’s easy to take a clip and interpret that as Ben saying, all seed oils are bad, but it’s the process ones that are the bad ones.

And the reason why The processed ones are so bad for us, it’s because they’re very unstable fats. They’re polyunsaturated fats. The word poly, we know, means many. So these polyunsaturated fats contain many double bonds. The more double bonds a fat contains, the more fragile these fats are. The more aggressive they attract oxygen.

So the way they process these oils, as you know, uh, JJ, they use heat. Oxygen and chemical agents. So they turn these fats rancid. They bottle them up. We’ve used them to fry and cook with. Heat them up even more. And they’re very unstable. It’s like biting into an apple, leaving it on the counter. Coming back five hours later, it starts to turn brown.

That’s kind of what’s happening to our cells. And the problem as well is they stay in our body for a very long time. Some studies suggest that the linoleic acid In the, uh, the vegetable oil, uh, the half life is about 680 days. Meaning, meaning if we stopped eating them today, about two years later, they’re still in our body fat, creating inflammation.

And, and one more point, uh, there’s a study called, uh, from Dr. Martin Grutfeld. I put this in metabolic freedom where they looked at French fries cooked in vegetable oils, a five ounce serving of French fry. French fries contains about 20 to 25 French fries, and it produced the same amount of aldehydes, which are cancer causing carcinogenic as 20 to 25 tobacco cigarettes.

So essentially JJ one French fry fried and vegetable oil is equivalent to one tobacco cigarette smoked.

I don’t even know what to say. I’ve never heard that one before. That’s crazy. I

know.

That’s crazy. Well, it’s always been my thinking on these seed oils is that, and I’m glad you brought it up that way.

These double bonds, it seems like it should be the opposite, but single bonds are the strong ones and double bonds. One can be broken apart. So all of a sudden you’ve hit it with oxygen, heat, bam, these things break apart and they get. Oxidized, they become bad, they’re rogue. And that really, like, if you had a very clean oil that wasn’t processed like that and you are in the right balance, this could work well.

And when I say that, like, uh, I think we all should, along with the fasting insulin and the vitamin D, like. Do an omega three index test once a year. Now, what’s funny, this omega three index test is going to look at how much omega three you have. And then it’s also going to look at your three, six. And what was interesting for me is I actually, you know, they say what in primal times we were four to one of our six to three.

And that is to keep our inflammation and check and balance. If you have too much one way, like if you’re too high on the sixes, you’ll be very pro inflammatory. If you’re too high in the threes, you could be. Um, cut and bleed out. So, you know, there’s a balance there. I actually was two to one. I’d pushed it too much.

Would he take a lot of fish oil? A little bit of

fish oil. I eat some fish. I eat only grass fed, grass finished. No sea. Like I was like, okay, it’s rare. Oopsies overachiever on that one. Um, but that then would give you a really good indicator. I remember years ago I’d done one, went, Oh, where are all these trans fats coming from?

But it was because I was eating out at restaurants and not. Paying attention, right? And that I think is where most of us are not at home using canola oil. That’s right. In the big, in the, or the mazola or one of these things. Well, my mom was when I was a

kid, but most people are not. Oh,

please. We had my, I remember my aunt.

Cause she had these, this horrible, uh, rheumatoid arthritis and she used margarine. She like everything was margarine. And whole wheat bread, margarine, whole wheat. And I’m like,

that’s why you have the arthritis, you know,

never using any of the things that we do. It was all of that stuff. It was, you know, Mazzola and margarine.

So my mom worked at Kentucky fried chicken when I was a kid. It’s part of the reason why I was obese. She would bring me home Kentucky fried chicken, right? She worked two jobs, did the best she can. I

love Kentucky fried chicken. Yeah, it’s really, it’s really me too. When I was a kid, I loved it. I haven’t eaten it since I was a kid, but that was the treat.

But there’s a

story behind this that relates to what you just said. So she would bring me home chicken most nights. Now some nights she would come home without the chicken. I would be pissed off. I’d say, mom, where’s the chicken? I was looking forward to it. And here’s what she told me. She said she didn’t bring it that night because the They don’t change the oil for 14 days.

So they use canola oil for soybean. They use a vegetable oil. They refry that same oil for about 14 days. Then it turns so black, then they change it. And that’s when she brings me the chicken and when they change it. So 14 days. So if you’re

still like that, do you think

probably,

I mean, it must, if, unless there’s some legislation, first of all, one day is a problem.

I know. Yeah. Like these are not high heat oils. So one day is a problem. Imagine all of this. I mean, these are not oils. You go and cook. And it’s so funny how they were like, don’t use coconut oil. I’m like, right,

right. And that’s a saturated fat, no double bonds. That’s

what you want. Won’t do this. Exactly.

So, so what are the challenges then that people will see if they are overeating These seed oils,

it could cause them to gain weight, right? It creates cellular inflammation. And when your cell membranes are inflamed, you’re not going to be able to burn fat as efficiently. Your hormones are not going to be able to do their job.

You’ll create hormone resistance. Um, it could create just overall inflammation in your body. It could create arthritis, like you mentioned your aunt, it could create autoimmune, and it’s going to just raise chronic inflammation. And when you raise chronic inflammation, you will have symptoms depending on your genetics susceptibility.

So, that could range from a long list of things, and what it does to the brain. I mean, these things are mitochondrial The brain has the highest concentration of mitochondria. So arguably the brain would probably be impacted the most JJ. You’d probably develop brain fog, might lead to dementia, Parkinson’s, these brain conditions that are on the rise.

So we want to take care of our mitochondria.

I wonder, we’ll talk about mitochondria next. I’m just wondering. Like someone coming in, they do it, they do a omega 3 index. You know, they’ve got higher body fat, they’re insulin resistant. They maybe are typical. The typical American, I think is 20 to one, six to three, where you want to be four.

It’s wild. And now they’re going to lose this. And so part of it, I think, is

really taking out the sixes altogether, really focusing on eating either saturated fat or omega 3s. Um, especially omega threes and MCTs for that time, because I feel like if you did that and exercised, you could probably change your tissue saturation faster.

You can, you could do that. And also the autophagy that you get through exercise or a fasting, you want to add fasting can also help with the, uh, recycling as well.

So that’s 680 days might be a lot faster for you.

Could be half that time. And I’m glad it’s one of my pet peeves with. All the intermittent fasters are like, as if intermittent fasting is the only way to trigger autophagy. And I’m like, I don’t know how long it takes to trigger autophagy with intermittent fasting, but I know with exercise, like it’s

right there,

it’s right there.

So, I mean, it’s predictable, right? I’ve, it’s probably not an on off switch anyway. So,

right. There’s always some form of it or, or it’s always occurring, but yeah, you could ramp it up with exercise and. Different degrees of fasting, but not only fasting.

Well, what do you say, before we get to mitochondria, because you talked about in your plan that one day fast.

What do you say about the potential for, um, and I’ve kind of, I keep flip flopping my opinion on this, but losing muscle mass, any issues with that one day? You know, with losing some muscle during that time,

I don’t think it’s an issue if you do it one day now, for those who do OMAD every single day, one meal a day, that’s a problem.

I know you’re not a big fan of that. I’m not either, but if you just threw it in one day out of the week, you’re going to be in a protein deficiency that day, for sure. You’re not going to get enough protein in that one meal. You’re not going to hit your target and that’s okay to be there for one day.

Just make sure you’re hitting that protein requirement the rest of the days. And you’re going to be there. The thing with the muscle mass and fasting. And I’ve spoken to Dr. Fung about this, Mike Motzel. There are different studies showing different things, right? I know, that’s why I’ve been like, hmm. It’s so confusing, right?

Is it mostly water? Is it like fiber? Is it actual muscle protein? Seems like

it must be the water. Yeah. It must be depleting

glycogen. I think

that’s kind of where I’m

at right now, JJ, because a lot of the studies that show you’re losing muscle, they’re not looking at what happens when you start to refeed.

Like, okay, is it built back up? And is it looking better

when they can’t really tell? I know you can’t tell. Are they doing MRIs? They’re not doing it. I mean, so how do they really know that skeletal muscle? What would make sense is that you’re 24 hour fast. You’re going to deplete glycogen. Glycogen is going to lose a lot of water.

So it’s going to look like it’s. Lean mass going, but I think the reality is, first of all, you could do a hundred grams of protein in that, that one meal. I can do that. And you’ll

stimulate muscle protein synthesis with just 40 grams. You

could do that. So, um, but if you’re doing some resistance training that day too.

You’ll be fine. And I think that if you’re doing some resistance training and you also maybe hit yourself with some essential amino acids as well, we’re all good. So I was way more uptight about it. I wouldn’t do a multi day fast. Um, and again, like that OMAD every day. Yeah. I don’t think that’s, that’s, well, most of us are stressed anyway.

Do we need to add another type of stress? Like, you know, my hormetic stress really is much more sauna and cold plunge at this point. So let’s flip over to mitochondria

before we do. Can I just mention the seed oil thing that I have for your audience? Yeah. Yes. Yes. So when I go to restaurants, I always tell the server, I’ve been telling them for years, I’m allergic to these vegetable oils.

Cause even fancy restaurants, JJ, you know this, they use these vegetable oils.

Well, they’ll say it’s an olive oil blend, a

blend. And you know, that’s cut

with canola for there’s a. Smidge of olive oil and a clench of canola oil.

So let me give your audience, which are the bad fats when they’re processed and then an option for avoiding them at restaurants.

So the bad fats are canola, corn, cotton seed oil, uh, corn oils, called a rapeseed oil in the UK or canola is called rapeseed Excuse me. So those are three sunflower, soybean. and safflower, and then rice bran and grapeseed oil. Those are what Dr. Kate Shanahan calls the hateful eight. What we want are saturated fats and monounsaturated fats like you spoke about earlier.

So butter, ghee, duck fat, beef tallow, coconut oil, avocado oil, and olive oil. If it’s organic, not cut in a dark glass bottle. So at restaurants, I’ve been telling my students for years. Do what I do. Just tell them you’re allergic. They’ll talk to the chef. They don’t want to get a lawsuit. They’re going to listen to you.

So I developed a seed oil allergy card where it makes it easy because people feel uncomfortable and I have a whole bunch to give to you, by the way, where you just show the server, the card, they’ll take it back to the chef on the card, it shows the bad oils you’re allergic to. And the healthier swaps, and they’re always going to find an option for you.

You’re going to treat them. Well, give them a good tip, of course, but that’s the way to avoid it. So, uh, seed oil out, seed oil, car. com is where your audience,

I’ll put it at, uh, JJ, virgin. com forward slash metabolic freedom. So someone put all your stuff there. I love that. I never would have thought of doing that.

And a couple of years ago, I had some clients who had a chef and the chef made a card. For when they went to the restaurant. Cause that was always my thing to say, just tell him you’re allergic to gluten. Tell him you’re allergic. I love it. Well, and so I’d never would have thought of it. He did it, but then I forgot again.

Like until you just said that I’m like, yeah, dad, that’s such a good, I’ll give you a bunch. It’s so good. Yeah. What a perfect thing. It works really well. Give it to everyone tonight at the dinner. Yeah. You know, bunch of people who would love this. So that is fantastic and super smart and way easier to do than people realize.

I mean, this is just not that big of a deal. And to

your point, if you do so many things, right. And you take the head. It’s not going to be that bad. Right. There’s also the, the mindset of going into it. Like if you think that meal is going to be inflammatory, your thoughts can create an inflammatory response.

If you go into that meal saying it’s not the healthiest meal, but I’m healthy, I’m going to process that well, then you’re going to process it well.

Hence the Elvis Sunday.

I

survived the Elvis Sunday. Well, if we ever do do dessert, I make, I use a Catalina crunches, a crust. And then I use like very specific ingredients with allulose and make, like I made a pumpkin dairy free pumpkin cheesecake for Thanksgiving with collagen.

And it was amazing. Right. And so my kids are used to that. Like they, they don’t ever have. Garbage stuff. They’re so blessed. Like that’s what they think is normal. Yeah. That’s what a blessing. Yeah. Well, they love to cook this way too. So. Thankfully it rubbed off, you know, people always want to know how to get your kids to eat healthy.

I’m like, just eat healthy. Exactly. Be the example. You know, if you do it, guess what they’ll do. Yeah. That’s what they know. Okay. Over to mitochondria. Yeah. So what, what is your approach? You know, what are you doing to keep your mitochondria healthy?

I love talking about the mitochondria and learning about it too, uh, in the book, I have some interesting facts about the mitochondria when I started to dig into it.

Well, let’s

talk about a couple facts about the mitochondria. Yeah, let’s

talk about a couple facts. Well, here’s one fact. We get all of our mitochondria from our mother. So depending on your mother’s health could depend on the health of your current mitochondrial state. Um, the cells in the body that are most required for survival are the cells that have the most mitochondria.

For example, the brain. There are regions in the brain that could have over 2 million mitochondria in a single cell. The brain is required for thinking, you know, being able to survive, find your, your food. The eyes are also loaded in mitochondria to be able to see your predator. Your, the ovaries are also loaded in mitochondria, the testicles, the heart.

These are all very important for survival. There are hundreds of thousands of mitochondria. So that’s how important they are. God put them in the cells that are most needed for survival and reproduction. They’re bacteria, these little organelles that are really important for not just energy production. I know we learned that in high school biology class, the powerhouse of the cell, but they’re also, there’s an intelligence to the mitochondria where they act like surveillance systems for stressors and threats, right?

So we know about long COVID, for example, people who have got exposed to COVID. Now they have symptoms even months or years later. That’s a cellular danger response, where they already had a high stress bucket. They got the stress of a virus coming in. The mitochondria saw that threat, lowered its energy production.

This is why we feel tired when we’re sick. The virus went away. But now the mitochondria got stuck in this cell danger response. Dr. Robert Navio calls it wartime metabolism. So we needed to switch that mitochondria back to peacetime metabolism. And one of the best ways to do that is moving your body, moving your body, walking.

I know you’re a big fan of walking. Walking is a great way to mildly stress the mitochondria, forcing it to adapt, right? Stress is how you improve mitochondrial health, but it needs to be stressed that you adapt to. Not just throwing in a cold plunge and a sauna. If you’ve never done it before, you’re going to feel worse and actually do more harm.

Right? So mild stress, ketosis is a mild stress walking, and then you start adding in some resistance training with the more you could add some stressors to the mitochondria. The more it adapts, gets out of this wartime metabolism, starts producing energy, which raises your basal metabolic rate, which by default helps you burn more fat.

Nice. And I think the important thing that there is, is. Too much stress, you’ll die. Like it’s the right amount of stress and then you adapt and then more stress and then you adapt. It’s a, it’s a process to get there.

That’s right. Hormesis, the process of hormesis. You stay in that hormetic curve, which drives me crazy in the biohacking space that we’re in, right?

Because we hear, I’m not in the bio. Well, I am in the biohacking space. I’ll identify a

couple of things I love in the biohacking space, but as I’m always, Fighting with them going, could we major in the majors before we major in the minors? And he spoke

about that on my podcast. And I agree with you. Um, but what drives me crazy, I am in the biohacking space.

What drives me crazy is we talk about cold plunging and sauna and PMF. Uh, first of all, you’re correct. Those are not the majors. Those are the minors that are add ons to actually, after you do all the work, but you asked the average cold plunge coach, whatever they’re called. Is there such a thing? There’s some.

Facilities that have cold plunge coaches. I don’t know what their name is, but there is a thing and they’re all over Miami. Wow. But you go to this cold plunge clinic, right? And you’ve never cold plunge and you asked a coach, how long should I go for? You know what they’re going to say? Three minutes. Every time it’s three minutes.

If you’ve never cold plunge before, should you do it for three minutes? And what temperature are we talking? Usually 39 degrees.

No, not for a woman. Or even a man who’s never done it. You know what I tell a woman? I, first of all, it’s 50, 52. I go, get in, get out. That’s right. Get in, get out. That’s all you’re supposed to do.

You’re smarter than all the cold plunge coaches. And I go, and you may

like, you know, the whole point is to get in there, shiver and get out.

Yeah.

That’s all.

Right. Yeah. Then if you do too much, you don’t adapt. You feel wiped out.

Yeah. Or you totally adapt and then you get no benefits from it. Or

that too.

That’s what I was like when we

first got our cold plunge. I just started distracting myself in there and I got myself to the point where I was doing like 12 minutes and we had it down at like 46 and then I was talking, you must know Mark Sisson. Of course. Okay. So Mark, he’s down by me. What are you doing?

Because that’s not the point of it. I’m like, it’s not, you know, but I mean, I, all the information I was hearing out there, I was like, more is better, no more is not better. And it was so relieving honestly, cause now I’m like, you don’t have to do it. No, I do two minutes. Well,

some of the research that I put this in the book shows that.

11 minutes per week is the ideal range to hit for the mitochondrial uncoupling benefits and for explain what that is. That means you’re helping your mitochondria produce more energy at the same time, lower it’s free radical production, which is key. Uh, also the Beijing of fat to Browning of fat. So helping you burn more fat, activating cold shock proteins, which again, help the mitochondria.

So a lot of studies show when you accumulate 11 minutes per week at 59 degrees Fahrenheit or less. So it doesn’t have to be as cold as 39. It could be 58, uh, 11 minutes per week, but you don’t start there. You work your way there. And I wouldn’t do it in one setting. I

would think you’re better off to do small settings than one 11 minute one.

Anyway, I

agree. And that’s how I do it personally. And I actually like my sauna more than I do the cold plunge

who doesn’t like their sauna more than their cold plunge. We actually now have two saunas.

Which one do you have? So

we have the big sunlight and we had one and we had to, we got a bigger one.

Yeah.

So the

impulse is the impulse. Yeah, that’s the one I have.

So we have that one for like six or eight people, but we’re tall, right? So, you know, we took up a lot of space in that sauna. So they have that. And then we got one of those relax, the. Fast heat ones. I haven’t seen those. This is you’ll see it tonight.

I’ll show it to you. So what, so the, the sunlight, and I like to use that one at night. And so we’ll, we’ll watch Netflix in there. So that’s kind of my rules for watching Netflix. We’ll get in the sun. I love it. And, but, and plus you can do the sauna at any point. It’s not going to interfere with your anabolic response to exercise.

Right? So the, but in the morning, what I like to do is 10 minutes to 15 minutes in the quick one. Cause the quick one. You know how you have to warm up. So the quick one goes immediately up to 180 degrees. And so I, and it goes up to your neck. My husband puts a hat on and he puts this thing around his neck.

I’m like, I got to blow out. I’m not, that’s not happening. But I do it for 10 to 15 minutes. Then I go get in the cold plunge. The cold plunge is right next to it. And sometimes I’ll go over and do the red lights because I have the juve red lights. I just cannot tell if the red lights are really like, I can’t figure out if these red lights are really doing anything or not.

A mystery to me. Do you have any opinion on those? Well, the

research is pretty solid. I do them every day as well. I know. It’s

a big challenges. You’re like,

yeah,

I mean, you take creatine, you know, you took it. You take like, you know, might appear or qualia and 80 plus. You’re like, I took it. I know I can feel it.

Red lights. I’m like, I don’t know.

I think it’s more of the cumulative, cumulative, uh, effects, consistent use of it that you might notice the effects, uh, especially with like skin health, but I put a whole bunch of additional red light in my sunlight and impulse. So I have the red light that comes with it and added a couple more

panels.

Yeah. Well, sunlight and didn’t tell me to do it. I did, I did it on my own.

Well, we need some coaching on that. Yeah. And then we have a hyperbaric in there too.

Oh, that’s awesome.

So you got quite the setup. You’ll see the setup. And then I built a gym. Upstairs. So I love it. It’s basically I created a retreat hotel that we come home to.

It’s beautiful. It feels like a retreat hotel. It’s fabulous. Okay. So mitochondria, then red light, um, some hormetic stressors exercise. Tell me about like, what are your exercise recommendations?

Um, what do I do for myself or what I would recommend for, okay. So for myself, I do three to four strength training workouts per week, 30 minutes to 40 minutes each time.

And then I play basketball for two hours every Sunday. Uh, that’s my routine. And after my strength training workouts, I just shoot basketball hoops in my driveway for like 20 minutes. And then I get into my sauna. That’s usually my routine. And I get about 12 to 14, 000 steps per day. Every day is my, my goal.

So that’s what I do. Um, in general, I mean, if somebody is brand new, I’ll start them off by walking, right? You know this, right? Just get some steps in, increase those steps, add resistance to the steps. And then we start strength training. We could start with one strength training workout per week, where we focus on maybe three to four different, um, sets and different rep ranges, uh, for 30 minutes each time and kind of build for their build up from there.

But I think. And I want to hear your input on this. I think three to four workouts per week is a good sweet spot of about 30 minutes. Each workout. I see a lot of people do too much and they don’t recover their sleep sacrifices, their HRV drops. So I think three to four is a good sweet spot, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

It really depends how you’re splitting your workouts up. Women recover. Faster than men do. Um, I think using HRV as a monitor is the great thing. It used to be that we were like, let’s check your, your resting heart rate. And is it higher? And like, you know, how’s your grip strength, but we can do it now just by monitoring HRV.

And your aura

ring will go, Hey, Chill it today. That’s right. Um, and so I’m very intuitive when I go and work out, like today I decided I was going to do a lot of times I’ll split, I’ll do upper body pushing and pulling one day and lower body

hinging

one day. And then sometimes I’ll do four days of that.

Then I’ll go do, um, a big full. body thing. Like today I did squats and deadlifts and overhead presses and chest presses and bent over rows and pull ups.

Great workout. I was like,

I was like, and I really like literally woke up this morning and go, this is what I want to go do. I love it. This is great. Um, so it just depends because the other side of it is, I really want people to get in high intensity interval training.

And so it depends on how they’re going to organize it. Like to me, getting in at least two days of resistance training a week. And, and, you know, if you hit it really hard, those two days, you did like every third day, that might be enough, you know? So it depends on someone and what they love to do. And how their schedule works and how hard they want to work out.

And then we, we create it for them based on that.

Smart. And I love the idea of tracking HRV. One of my favorite metrics. I know you do too. You were lecturing about it, um, on it on Hacker Health this, this year, such a great metric to track, right? I mean, HRV gives you such a great gauge, not just for exercise, but.

All the stressors we’re applying to ourselves. If you see that thing drop, that’s a day for rest and recovery. It’s not a day to push yourself even if you had that scheduled in.

The interesting thing with it, and I was all freaked out about my HRV because it was reading so low. What the heck? I’m doing every single possible thing that, that I could do.

And the only time I’d see it start to go up is like, I do a week long Joe dispenser retreat. And I’m like, well, this is not real. Joe. So. Then I had Molly Maloof on the podcast and she goes, you know, you have to wear the chest strap to get the real number. And I went, Oh, it’s like doing a Dexa versus bio impedance.

I go, all right. Then I did that. I’m like, Oh, it’s fine. Now I’ll just do the relative. We’ll be able to see where things are, but it is, it is a great way to just kind of check in to see where you are and how hard you should push it. Yeah. You know, and not every day is going to be your hardest day. That’s an important thing too.

Yeah. I did the, uh, continuous, uh, HRV strap as well, which gives you some good data, right? Yeah. You could like, well,

we used to use that way back when

we used to use for calories or heart rate. Yeah, no,

it was like how we all back in the eighties. No, I,

I remember that with my gym

days too. We used it because when I was in grad school, first of all, here are the things we were told, do not let someone lift weights till they lose the weight first.

dumb, wrong thing. Wow. Yes. And you must do at least 30 minutes of cardio or don’t bother because you have to get into your heart rate zone and you’re not going to burn any fat. I mean just as dumb stuff. You’re not going to burn fat. I’m like, Oh my gosh. But we, we were taught this in grad school. That’s what we were taught.

Wow. And you know, I realized later we, my grad school, the research department was All cardio based. I did strength. I went rogue. I found a different advisor in the biomechanics lab and did strength. They probably thought you were so weird. And, uh, but the cardio ones, everything was 30 minutes. Why? Because you have the person comes in for the, from their class, right?

So it’s a class. So they have to come in, they have to change. They do their cardio. They’re getting their workup. That’s all they could do is 30 minutes. So 30 minutes, like you wonder, just like the, um, intermittent fasting eight hour window was because the research assistant. And had to be home at a certain time.

And so they had eight hours on schedule. Sometimes you look at these things and go question it, there might be something better out there or at least better for you.

So yeah, really good point is

anything that we haven’t covered? Cause I know we’ve gone all, this is how women interview. We meander through.

I love it. It keeps things fresh. I love it. You’re a great interviewer. Never know where we’re

going.

It’s easy. Well, I could say this, my favorite part about the book, uh, is chapter 10, which is the thoughts, how your thoughts influence your metabolism and your health. And I’d love to share a little bit more about that.

Yeah. Let’s go into that. I think that’s like the most important piece. Um, in the book, I talk about the origin of the placebo effect. And the nocebo effect, right? The placebo effect that we all know a lot of studies are placebo controlled studies and, uh, it actually started off in World, World War II. Uh, there was a medical unit where a gentleman named Henry Beecher, Dr.

Henry Beecher was working on this medical tent and all these soldiers were coming into the tent, bullet wounds, legs blown off. They were in bad shape. So they were giving morphine. They were administering morphine to calm the soldiers down. Transfer them to the hospital in order to save their lives. At one of these medical tents, the, they ran out of morphine.

So the nurse, JJ, freaked out and said, Oh my gosh, what do I do? We’re out of morphine. So she put salt water, saline solution, in the needles, gave it to Dr. Beecher, said here’s more morphine. So he had the belief he had morphine in his hand and he told the soldiers, I’m giving you morphine. You’re going to feel better in a matter of seconds.

So he traded, he transferred his belief to the soldiers and most of them survived, right? So the war ended Harvard studied what the heck happened at that medical tent. That’s where the placebo effect started. That’s where they started to study the placebo effect, right? Isn’t that interesting? Now, there’s also the nocebo effect.

And in the book, I have a story about this railroad employee. 1960s. He worked inside of a refrigerator cart on a railroad station on the train. And he was working late one night, and he got locked in the refrigerator cart. It was 11pm. He was banging on that door. All of his coworkers went home for the night and he knew nobody was clocking in until the next morning and he was cold.

So he started to write on the wall and document kind of his night. He was really worried about surviving that night because it was cold. He would write at 12 a. m. 12 a. m. Nobody’s around getting colder by the minute. I don’t know how I’m going to make it in the morning. Oh, 1 a. m. He would write down shivering, still cold.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. Nobody’s here to save me. 2 a. m. Freezing. I could barely speak. 7 a. m. Rolls around his coworkers clock in. They open up that refrigerator cart. The guy’s dead. Hypothermia. He froze to death. The interesting part about the story Wasn’t that cold. was that the temperature apparatus that he was looking at had been broken for days, and it never got below 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

The nocebo effect. His thoughts created a scenario where his body followed and induced hypothermia, right? So if our thoughts can do that, you better believe our thoughts could heal us. We could, if we use our thoughts in the right direction and we have 60, 000 thoughts a day, we could use those thoughts to heal the body.

I think the greatest biohack is this the greatest health tip or biohack, whatever you want to call it. Dr. Bruce Lipton has shown that your thoughts are a frequency that communicate with your DNA to produce a protein. If it’s a healthy thought, it’s an anti inflammatory protein. If it’s a resentful, hateful thought, it’s an inflammatory protein where you shrink your telomeres and you age yourself.

So if we know our thoughts could do that, and we have 60, 000 thoughts per day, JJ, that means we have 60, 000 opportunities to put the body in the healing state every single day. And I think that is one of the greatest health tips that I’ve ever discovered. And then in chapter 10, I talk all about how to do that the right way.

Yeah. Fantastic. I think back to, I was working with, this was kind of actually crazy. I was working, helping a doctor who was Obese, kind of on the verge of morbidly obese, lose weight. But the bizarre thing was he was a bariatric doctor. So his specialty was weight loss and I’m helping him lose weight. And he tells me this one thing, he goes, so I have a technique I use with my patients and if they do this technique, a hundred percent of them are successful.

The technique was to take a picture. Of the body that you would love to have and put your face on it and carry it around and use it and hold it and just make it real. Of course, I was begging the question of like, why aren’t you doing like, why aren’t you doing this? And why wouldn’t you just make this mandatory for everybody?

You know? Um, I

love that by the way. I do that.

So it’s so it’s funny when I heard that I’m like, I got Dara Torres. Do you remember who she is? Dara Torres was like the, like, she became like an Olympic gold medalist swimmer in her forties and she had the most ripped abs. She was like amazing. So I was like, stick my face on that.

You know,

did you do that? Really? Yes. I love it. I was like,

let’s find, because you also find the body that works with you and like, you know, I mean, I’m not going to be the curvy body no matter what I try. Like I am a, an athletic body have been my whole life. That’s what I have. That’s what I want to go after.

So I’d put it on like, you know, Gabby Reese’s body or Dara Tora’s body, but it makes so much sense.

That’s the whole idea of like having a vision board or, uh, what I call a goal card. I actually carry it with me. I have my goal card where I have my goals written out in present tense as if it’s already accomplished.

And every day I read it as if it’s already done. I’m feeling what it feels like if it’s done every morning, I look into my vision board, right? You’re going to like this on my vision board. I have photos of me sitting across the table from Joe Rogan. Uh, right. So it’s Photoshop, right? So I’m envisioning being on Joe Rogan, right?

It’s just a matter of time because our wants and our X, uh, our wants and desires are in our conscious mind. Our expectations are in our subconscious mind. So we could want all the things we want and desire all the things we desire, but it isn’t until you take that. Turn it into your subconscious mind.

Then you start to act that way and perform that way. One of the easiest ways to do that is to look at a visual or affirm it with a goal card or an affirmation. It takes that and it accelerates the process. I’m a big fan of that process.

Yeah. It’s one I’ve used my whole life. Have

you

really? I love

it.

We’re on the same page.

Well, since once I discovered it, um, I did it. I didn’t realize I was doing it when I was a teenager and in my twenties. I just did it naturally. And then when I started mentoring with this mindset coach, who I thought was a business coach, but she was a mindset coach, which was more effective.

That was one of the key tools she had me do. It’s just act as if just make it right. Right.

That’s what act great actors do that, right? You believe that they’re that person. They could piss you off, right? It’s like, they’re really good. We want to do the same thing and act as if.

So for everybody listening, think of what that just freed you up in terms of possibility.

Right. It’s powerful. Yeah. But the other one with that is quite often when you’re making that shift you have to let go of so many Things, which might include people who hold you in a box and see you a specific way, right? And they don’t see you as this health fit, vibrant, amazing person, then they don’t necessarily want to have you be that person because then they’re going to have to hold a.

Like to themselves, it’s just something to be aware of as we go through life. That’s

so important when you, when you change, you become a threat to people in your life who are not changing. Not only do you have to adapt to the changes, but everybody around you has to adapt to the changes. If you’re going out drinking with them and you’re not drinking anymore, they’re not going to like that.

They want the old version of you back. They want to have fun with you.

My husband, when I met him, he had most of his, well, all of his friends were from high school or college. And I don’t really have any friends from high school or college. All of mine have been in the last 20 years. My oldest friend in this whole space is Mark Sisson.

Isn’t that funny? I love Mark, by the way. It’s just the best. So as he started to step into this whole world and like leave a corporate job and move into entrepreneurship and get super failed, his friends were the crabs in the crab pot. That’s right. Oh my gosh. Even at our wedding, they were like, we see you changing.

I’m like, Oh my gosh.

Did your husband, like, did that impact him or did he?

Oh yeah. I mean, not in a bad way. He just sees it. You know, you see things for what they are. I was like, thank you for showing me who you are. Yeah, exactly. But it’s something we all do need to be aware

of. It’s true. Your environment, because the way that it works, and I’m glad you brought this up.

Our environment determines the thoughts that we think. And our belief system, which determines the steps that we take and our habits, which determine our results and then our destiny. So I talk about changing your thoughts, but it’s very difficult to do that. If you don’t change your environment. You change the environment, it helps you change your thoughts, you surround yourself with people who are on the same page, it’s easier to change those thoughts and change your life.

That

30 year old, my mentor, Kay Smith, that’ll be my book after the next book. It’s my final book. It’ll be around, I just realized, I was like, I have to write this because I realized so many things I say every single day were from this woman. Um, who’s amazing. But the first thing that she had me do, well the very first thing she had me do was put rubber bands on my wrist and any time I had a limiting belief I had to snap the rubber band.

Great. Because you don’t realize what you do all day long. And then she was like, everything you listen to, everything you read, everyone you’re around, all of it. All of it shifted, you know, the, everything at the time, it was all, um, nightingale Conan on a Sony Walkman. I went to augment Dino and Zig Ziglar, like the whole thing, major change.

And then it just becomes who you are. And you know, you just don’t realize there’s any other way to think like, you know, you know, the story about my son and that’s why my, you know, when my 16 year old son’s lying in a stretcher and the doctor’s telling him, telling us he’s going to die. My 15 year old son’s like.

Sounds like he’s got like a 0. 125 percent chance he’d make it, you know, that’s not zero. Let’s take it. You know? Yeah. So, I mean this, you just never know the trickle down effect of this to other people as you just live this life. It’s true. I’m thrilled you have that chapter in there and this book is out when

May 13th, your audience could preorder it.

We’ll give you a link to put on your, uh, your page.

Okay.

So May 13th with Hay House, it’ll be, uh, available on at bookstores audible. I’m going to narrate it myself. Good. Yes, you must narrate. I will even though it’s a pain in the butt, but I will do it. You have you narrated all your books? Yeah.

Well, and when Grant was in the hospital, I was literally in a little.

Wow. Like, yeah. So I was like going, whenever anybody whines about it, I go, you can do it. Respect. You can do it. You know, but.

I like when authors narrate their book.

It is my pet peeve to listen to a book that someone else has done. Like Jason Fung. Oh yeah. It’s very different. Has some Chinese guy. Cause they’re like, well, we’ll have another Chinese guy and it will sound like, it’s like, it’s not him.

Very different. It’s

very different. You know him. Yeah. You know, and Joe Dispenza had some British guy. I’m like, come on.

Oh, did he? I didn’t, I didn’t listen to his. I read his. Oh yeah. It’s, it’s so much better when the author does it. So I’m doing it myself. May 13th, it’s called metabolic freedom. And it, uh, everything we spoke about and plus more is in the book.

And at the end of the book, there’s a 30 day plan to achieve metabolic freedom.

Fabulous. Well, thank you so much. I super appreciate it. We’ll put everything at jjvirgin. com forward slash metabolic freedom. And I just glad you’re here in person and we get to have. A dinner party tonight.

I’m grateful to be on your podcast and to hang out with you tonight.

Thank you so much, 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, JJVirgin. com, and make sure to follow my podcast at SubscribeToJJ. com so you don’t miss a single episode.

And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference. and helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information. And 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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