ATHE_Transcript_Ep 576_What I’d Do if I Wanted to Lose 20 Lbs (Step-by-step)
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] I’m J. J. Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom. Turned 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 that I uncover with as many people as I can.
And that’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness. From personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.
Join me on the journey to better health. So you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.
[00:01:00] Okay. So you want to lose 20 pounds. If I wanted to lose 20 pounds, here’s what I would do. And first of all, you gotta ask yourself, what do I want to lose 20 pounds of? You want to make sure it’s not muscle. You want to make sure that when you’re losing those 20 pounds, you’re losing the majority of it from body fat.
While you’re holding on to, or even better yet, actually putting on muscle. Now here’s the deal. A healthy body can burn off body fat. Can hold onto and build muscle, but ideally, and the reality is you gotta get healthy. to do that. People think that you lose weight to get healthy. No, no, no. A healthy body easily loses fat, right?
So, I’m gonna walk through how you can restore your current health, because again, gotta get healthy, right? And any factors that can get in the way of you losing the weight or cause you to gain weight. And then, more importantly, step by step, how to heal your metabolism so you can lose that fat. All [00:02:00] right, first up, what is metabolic health?
And now you probably heard these crazy statistics that only 6. 8% of the population is truly metabolically healthy. Wow. Here’s how you know. Your waist, if you’re a woman, is 35 or higher. Your waist as a man, 40 or higher. That is a sign that you are not metabolically healthy. Your blood pressure is higher than 135 over 85.
Either one of those numbers, right? That or above. Your blood sugar is 100 or above. That’s your fasting blood sugar. Your triglycerides are greater than 150, or your HDLs are lower than 50 as a woman, lower than 40 as a man. Now, here’s one that they don’t talk about in terms of metabolic health, but it’s actually probably an earlier indicator, is uric acid.
Because, uric acid, if it’s 1% elevated, it’s an 11% increase in type 2 diabetes. So you’re gonna wanna look at uric acid, and you’re also gonna wanna look at [00:03:00] insulin, fasting insulin, where you really want that to be between 2 and 5. Those are actually earlier markers than a lot of this other stuff. But all of these things, what are they telling you?
That you are not as insulin sensitive as you want to be. That you are moving into or already are in insulin resistance or pre diabetes. And what is that anyway? What is insulin resistance? So insulin resistance is when the cells in your muscles, your fat in your liver, they just don’t hear insulin as well.
They don’t respond to it well. And because they don’t respond to it, that means that then the blood sugar in your blood isn’t easily taken up into your cells. As a result, your pancreas goes, oh, we need more insulin. So it makes more insulin to get that response, to get your blood sugar to move into your cells.
That keeps going, by the way, until your pancreas goes, Holy smokes, I cannot do it anymore, and that’s when we get into type 2 diabetes. How does this happen? A big one, of course, is diet. And especially fructose in the diet. [00:04:00] Now, I’m not talking about eating blueberries. I am talking about apple juice. I’m talking about…
I’m talking about like agave syrup, high fructose corn syrup, all of those types of things are big, big for insulin resistance, plus ultra processed foods, damaged oils, you know, basically the opposite of how I teach you to eat. That’s the first one. Stress is another one. Stress raises cortisol. Cortisol is catabolic.
Cortisol can make you insulin resistant. Another one is low… muscle mass. So muscle is one of the first places we can reclaim our insulin sensitivity. Muscle is a glucose sponge. It’s a sugar sponge. So it’s going to help have a place for those carbohydrates to land rather than landing in your visceral adipose tissue.
Another one is poor sleep. Do you know just one poor night of sleep and you are hungry or more insulin resistant? This is a cause, a big causal factor for insulin resistance and diabetes is poor sleep. And that means Not getting that seven to nine hours of [00:05:00] quality sleep every single night. Now fastest way to fix this is going to be diet and exercise.
We are going to get into this, but before I also want to talk about, we talked about insulin resistance. It goes hand in hand with something called leptin resistance and leptin resistance. And there’s some other things can mess up your hunger regulation. These tend to go along with insulin resistance. And here’s the thing.
You’re hungry? All bets are off. Okay, so what’s leptin resistance? If you have leptin resistance, your brain doesn’t respond as it normally would to leptin. Now, it’s constantly simulated by leptin, but you’re not getting the feeling you should, which is that feeling of fullness, of satiety. Right, which means you can’t hear it and you just keep overeating even though you should be full.
So how does one become leptin resistant? Inflammation causes it and by the way the things that cause insulin resistance basically Can cause leptin resistance to and things that you’ll see as elevated free fatty [00:06:00] acids. You’ll see high leptin levels. You’ll see big inflammation. We know insulin resistance is associated with what I call weight loss resistance.
That’s your, you just can’t seem to lose the weight. Leptin is as well. Here are a couple other things that you have to look at as you’re looking at, okay, I want to lose 20 pounds. I want to make sure that we are doing the right things. And if you’ve got hypothyroidism, Even minor hypothyroidism. This is your metabolic switch.
If your thyroid is not working well, it is going to be so darn hard for you to use stored body fat and as fuel and also to build muscle. Remember muscle is that metabolic sponge. For the sugar, right? And it’s also metabolic spanx where it’s going to hold everything in tighter and improve insulin sensitivity and boost your metabolism.
So thyroid is super key here. Thyroid is also important for sex hormone balance. And if you’re heading into menopause and you’re in that storm where estrogens bouncing up and down and progesterone is lowering and testosterone may or may not be lowering, but [00:07:00] estrogen helps you burn fat too high. It’s problematic too low.
It’s problematic. You want it Goldilocks, right? Just right. And during menopause. It’s not. And then after menopause, it drops. Both of those are problematic for being able to build muscle and burn fat. That’s why I’m a big fan of bioidentical hormones, as you start to go into that to help balance it out all the way through.
So that’s just one to know. They’ll say, Oh, no, you can totally lose weight doing that. Well, You’ve got to work with your hormones, and again, if estrogen is all over the place, it’s going to wreak havoc on your metabolism. The other one you might not be thinking about are toxins. And toxins, which are everywhere, air we’re breathing, what we’re drinking, what we’re putting on our bodies.
Toxins store in your fat. And when they store in your fat, your body goes, you know what? We gotta keep you safe. We don’t want those toxins out roaming around in your body, so we are gonna slow down your metabolism, cool things down, probably lower thyroid function, become a little insulin resistant so we can hold the toxins in the fat.
It’s why it’s important when you’re starting [00:08:00] to work on losing fat and using fat for fuel, that you know that you are a good detoxifier, that you’ve got good detoxification principles going on, so that as these fats liberate the toxins, you got a way to get ’em out, right? Super important. And then the other one that you might not be thinking about is your gut microbiome.
The biggest part of our gut microbiome is Firmicutes and bacteroides. We need to make sure we have those in the right balance so that we’re able to burn fat well, and that we’ve got our hunger hormones working well. In fact, when you look at these drugs now out, Munjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, all of these are working in a couple of ways that I’ve already talked about.
One of them is Helping release a little more insulin. So you get your blood sugar under control, but the other one is working through these gut hormones to tell your body you’re full. Right? Because again, if you’re hungry… All bets are off. So one of the things we have to make sure that we’re doing is healing our gut microbiome because again, that can be very problematic.
Another thing that can happen to your gut microbiome is [00:09:00] inflammation and inflammation can create insulin resistance. All right. Well, that was a whole lot of stuff of what could get in the way of you losing weight, but I want you to be aware of that because again, a healthy body Drops body fat and puts on muscle.
So if any of those things are in the way, we got to work on healing those. And I want you to know that. So you don’t start beating yourself up. If you get stuck, all of this is information and I’m going to give you the information you need to be able to do the right things. And then if you’re getting stuck, it’s time for you to become a health detective and figure out what’s not working so you can make the differences.
So let’s get started. So first thing. You got to identify what is your real target body weight and your real body composition goals. Sounds easy, a little complicated because what you want to do is go online. First of all, one way, easy way to do this. And I learned this from a new friend, Dr. Mary Claire Haver.
She goes, just think back to when you felt really good about yourself. But I think there’s a lot of us women were like, we always felt like, Oh, I need to lose weight. Right? So [00:10:00] see if you’ve got that one. But the other one that you can use is go online. And you’re going to figure out using usually a wrist measurement for what size frame you have.
And you need to test. We all think that we have a bigger frame size than we do. Test your frame size, put it with your height, and figure out your range for your ideal target body weight. And then, you know, pick the number that you think really makes sense for you. And then also, you want to look at your body composition.
This is really what’s more important. You know, people will tell me, Oh my gosh, I’m the same weight I was when I was in high school and now I’m 60. But if you have not been working out and working out with weights, you’re not the same body composition. Because as we age, if we’re not actively fighting against it and putting on muscle, we’re losing muscle and putting on fat.
And we are becoming a fluffier version of ourselves. We want to be solid like a rock. We’ve got to be actively monitoring our body composition. Your body composition is basically two main things. Fat. And not fat or lean body mass. Now, lean [00:11:00] body mass or fat free mass are basically the same, not quite. In your fat free mass, you’ve got muscles, you’ve got organs, and you’ve got smooth muscles or organs, you’ve got bones.
And you’ve got skeletal muscle. The one we’re obviously changing is skeletal muscle. In your fat, you’ve got fat all over. But then you’ve got visceral adipose tissue. The visceral adipose tissue, too much body fat is not good. Visceral adipose tissue is the big problem. So we want to make sure we’re looking at all of that.
The way I love to do that is through something called a DEXA. Getting that done twice a year. We used to do that for bone density. You now do it for your whole body composition. Get yourself an inexpensive bioimpedance scale for home. There’s even ones now for 20 bucks. Are they perfectly accurate? No, it doesn’t matter.
You do the same time every single day, same conditions, and you look for the relative change. That’s what you’re looking for. Right? And you use a tape measure too, so that you can look at your waist and your hips, waist at the narrowest point, hips at the widest point and watch those. If you are losing weight and [00:12:00] not losing your waist, you are making yourself worse, not better.
This is the first important thing. Now I can’t tell you exactly like how much muscle mass is ideal. I haven’t seen any research on this yet, it’s like there’s kind of stuff poking around on this. But basically what we want to see is, you want to be ideally laying down as much muscle as you can, for as long as you can.
That’s the goal there, because again, muscle is that metabolic spanx. Once you’ve got this information, a simple bioimpedance scale can do this as well. A DEXA is going to do it better, they’re going to identify what’s called your resting metabolic rate. Which is what you need, because while we are going to really focus on macros, calories count.
Where they come from is going to count more. You’re never going to convince me that a Snickers bar and wild salmon do the same metabolic effect to the body. They do not. I know that if I can push you into more protein and more non starchy vegetables, kick out the ultra processed carbs, kick out the high fructose things, we are going to make a metabolic shift, but we also need to go into a deficit.
We are going to start [00:13:00] first with exercise. Both things are important. You want to lose weight. You want to lose fat. And you want to put on muscle you got to exercise and you’ve got to eat correctly diet Initially will make the bigger shift but exercise I tell people do not start doing this if you are not willing to exercise because I’ve got to make sure that you’re holding on to or building muscle as you’re going through this and if you’re not exercising it ain’t going to happen you’re going to lose muscle and we cannot afford to lose muscle.
So promise me, promise me that you’re going to do resistance training as we do this three times a week. Now three times a week you are going to do big compound movements. Compound means it moves more than one joint. So we are basically going to do upper body pushing. Upper body pulling and hips and thighs.
Now I also include in there power core, but here’s the deal. If you’re doing free weight, big compound movements or body weight movements, or using a TRX or a tonal, you’re using your core. How awesome is [00:14:00] that? First thing I’m going to have you do is resistance training, and ideally you’re doing somewhere between six and nine exercises.
You’re going to work into doing three to four sets of each of those, and you’re going to work into doing eight to 15 repetitions of the heaviest weight you can handle in good form. I have done videos on this. This is a whole separate thing, but I’m just giving you the prescription here.
I want you to dig deeper by going into my other videos on this, but that’s the resistance. That’s the primary and the most important focus on this. Because what we tend to do, and I know when I was in grad school, I went rogue in grad school, because I was like, I’m going to do this on resistance training.
If I want to really help someone change their body comp, it’s all about resistance training. This was 35 years ago, I was like a crazy person. Everything was about cardio, and I think still today, most of the research is on cardio. And we need cardio, we want cardiorespiratory fitness. When you think about fitness, it’s muscular strength, right?
Muscular power, it’s flexibility, it’s stability, it’s [00:15:00] agility. And… So, and we’ve got to have that cardio respiratory. So we want to do cardio, but what I really want you to focus on in cardio is high intensity interval training. And in there, throw in some true sprint training, maybe even some plyometric training.
And high intensity interval training is where you go all out. for anywhere from 8 to 60 seconds and then you walk it off and recover. The harder you go, the more you need to recover from. I just did a really big HIIT workout, I’m still sore from to be honest, where we were sprinting and jumping and we would jump and then we would have to recover for like four times as long and then we would jump, right?
Cause it was so intense. The more intense, the better it is at burning off this visceral adipose tissue. And here’s what’s super cool about resistance training and HIIT training. Cause someone, someone pinged me on Instagram and they go, okay, how hard should it, how, how heavy should I lift? I go, the heaviest weight you can handle in good form.
How fast should I go? As fast as you can do, right? It’s all [00:16:00] personalized to you. You might be able to hold dumbbells of 40 pounds each and do a stiff leg deadlift. You might only be able to hold 10 pounds dumbbells, or you might have to start with nothing. Doesn’t matter. It’s whatever you can do in good form.
Form comes first. And for high intensity interval training, it’s whatever you can do, and you can do for up to that time you’re doing. I always say, go harder, and go less, and recover. Then, this is a great blood sugar hack, is walk after your meals. Especially at night, if you can get into the habit of moving after your meals.
If you can’t get outside, maybe you’ve got something that you can do inside, even like dance. No one’s watching, right? But if you can do that for 20 minutes, big bonus, because you’re going to suck the carbohydrates into your muscles. You’re going to lower the blood sugar response to the meal. So walking after your meals, moving after your meals, major.
Get that in a couple times a week. I now make sure that I do something self care every evening, and I kind of go between walking, Sauna. [00:17:00] Walking, sauna. And sometimes I go all out and walk and do the sauna. That’s the exercise part. Bonus point if you can throw in a hot yoga class once a week. Great for detox.
Great for flexibility. And stability. Balance is huge. The next one, and I am hardcore on this, you must track and guess what you’re going to find out. You are so underestimating what you think that you are eating. It’s crazy. We think we’re getting in the protein that we need. We’re not. So that’s the place we might overestimate, but the rest of it, we’re totally underestimating.
So I start everybody out and I’m now it’s a non negotiable. You got to use a tracking app. I am a fan of the tracking app, Carbon. That Lane Norton created. Big fan of that. Some of these other apps, like, they have crazy recommendations. This one follows what we preach here, which is eating 0. 7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of target body weight.
So remember how we figured out your target body weight? And remember how we figured out your resting metabolic rate? Here’s what we’re going to do. [00:18:00] You are doing something called re comping in the fitness world. Sounds super hip. And what that means is you are going to be losing fat while putting on muscle.
We used to think you couldn’t do this, you had to pick one or the other. And if you really, really, really needed to put on muscle and focus there, it’s easier to put muscle on with a little bit of fat and then take the fat off. But we’re going to focus on both here, and that means you’re going to go up to the higher end on protein.
One gram of protein per target body weight, super important for your carbohydrates. I love what Dr. Don Lehman says. He says you have to earn your carbs. Basically you want to eat your carbs for the fiber and the polyphenols to fuel your gut microbiome and heal it. This is super important. So you’re going to end up probably around, I call it 0.
7 gram to one gram of carbs. Per your body weight, one gram. If you’re active, super active 0. 7. If you’re not, here’s the baseline. It’s five or more servings of non starchy vegetables a day cup of raw, half a cup of cooked is a serving. You can do better than that. I do 10 a day. That’s what I’d love to see with you.
Two [00:19:00] fruit servings a day. That’s like a big apple, a cup of berries. Two of those a day. Then, if you have room to spare because you’re using the tracking app, you can get the rest from a little bit of slow low carbs. Beets, lentils, wild rice, those types of things. Right? The other thing you’re going to get from there is healthy fats.
Now here’s the thing, you’re eating healthy, clean, lean protein, you’re going to get some fat there. Wild salmon, grass fed beef, you’ll get some fat. You’re eating non starchy vegetables, probably having some salads. You’re cooking, so you’ll probably get in some ghee or some extra virgin olive oil, so you’ll get some healthy fats there.
Whatever else? Add in whole fats. Add in things like, you know, chia, flax, avocado. But you’re using that tracking app to help you lose two pounds of fat a week. And what we’re really watching is to see how your body’s doing with this. If it’s not going according to plan, then we gotta look at all those things I talked about.
What’s going on with insulin resistance? What’s going on with leptin resistance? What’s going on with menopause? Where’s your estrogen? What’s going on with your thyroid? What’s [00:20:00] going on with your gut microbiome? Are you toxic? Right? So I brought it up first. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but alcohol when you’re trying to drop body fat Does not mix.
Why? Because alcohol is metabolized first. So basically, if you go, you know what, I’m going to eat these things, and I want to be able to, you know, make my, get my muscles fueled with these amino acids, and, you know, burn up my carbs. Well, now you’ve got alcohol on board, and alcohol shuts down anything else from happening.
So you are not going to be now burning fat because you got to burn alcohol. So if you’re trying to lose weight, alcohol is very, very difficult. So what you might want to do is, like, if you love your red wine like I do, is I just go, you know what, I only have it when I go out, and I don’t go out very often anyway.
So one night a week, I’ll have a glass of red wine. That is not going to be the problem. Every night, problem. And I try to stick with, I’ll bring dry farm wine with me to the restaurant and pay the corkage fee. Of course, obviously, we’re lowering our sugar impact. If you’ve got sugar sneaking in and a sweet tooth you haven’t been able to handle, stop [00:21:00] right now and do the sugar impact diet, super important.
And of course, we’re not eating any of those ultra processed foods that just make you want more and more and more. How do you know if you’re eating an ultra processed food? If you have a little and all you want is more, because they’ve been designed to do that. The other thing here is we need to make sure we’re avoiding any hidden food intolerances because they create inflammation which blocks muscle protein synthesis and leads to insulin resistance.
So I say, you know, if you’re not sure, either do a food sensitivity test, an IgG4, or do the Virgin Diet to see if you can do things like dairy and eggs. They can be amazing proteins, but not amazing for everybody. Sadly, my husband’s got leaky gut right now, cannot do dairy or eggs at all. Wouldn’t listen to me, but would listen to the test.
So you can do the virgin diet. It helps you figure it out You can do a food sensitivity test. Other thing that needs to happen You gotta stay super hydrated. This helps so much. Helps with satiety. Helps you stay full. Helps with detoxification. And if you’re mildly dehydrated, you’re gonna convert glucose to fructose and store it as fat.
You will be in fat storage, not fat [00:22:00] burning mode. So you gotta have lots of fluid. Super important. Here’s a couple hacks too to help you. I really love wearing a CGM. Right now I have a Thea CGM on I’ve been testing. I love wearing a CGM because what we really want to see is how your blood sugar is improving and what things are impacting your blood sugar.
The things that can help your blood sugar, again, apple cider vinegar, a tablespoon before a meal, I like to put that in green tea, green tea can help too. Berberine, amazing for your blood sugar, that’s another great hack. Lemon juice as well. So wearing a cgm can really help you figure out what’s working for you What’s not what you need to shift in your diet again walking after a meal can lower that blood sugar or even dancing push ups Etc.
And then doing the apple cider vinegar or doing lemon juice or doing lemon juice and a little chia seeds fiber before a meal can really help as well. Beyond just the berberine, I think that everyone should be taking a good basic multivitamin mineral antioxidant formula. Nutrient deficiencies are going to get in the way of you healing.
So that’s a [00:23:00] basic. The other one that you want to do, if you are 40 plus, creatine for the win. Three to five grams of creatine monohydrate every single day. If you are 120 pounds or below, three grams good. More than that, 5 grams. And you need to get to tissue saturation, which takes about a month. Or you can do a 4 times a day loading dose for a week.
So, for 5 to 7 days. So if you were 3 grams, do 4 times a day for 5 to 7 days. And then you can just go into your regular dose. Creatine is going to help you hold on to and build muscle. Super important. Again, protein powder is another one I think is really, really important here because it’s going to help ensure that you get that 30 grams or more at each meal.
And then the other one that I’m really keying on are enzymes. Protein digestive enzymes, the only caveat is if you have ulcers. Other than that, you’ve got to be able to break down and use what you’re eating. As you’re healing your gut, your gut might not be so great at this, right? You want to make sure that you’re really breaking down that, those, those [00:24:00] foods that you can then…
Break them down and use the different components the way you should as we age, our stomach acid gets lower. This can lead to things like food intolerance. So let’s make sure that we’ve got that going on. Enzymes are a great one as well. Now I know I covered a lot here and the basics for you to know really for what you need to do is be aware of those hidden causes of weight loss resistance.
Make sure that you identify your target body weight. Super duper important. And then use that tracking app. Make sure that you’re getting in the right amounts that you need in terms of food and macros. And then you’re doing the right exercise. If you’re doing all of that and things aren’t quite working, then you start to look at what are those areas of weight loss resistance that I need to dig into.
Because remember, you gotta get healthy to be able to lose fat and build muscle. You don’t… Lose weight to get healthy. Super important. So the next thing obviously to dig in here probably is around how to balance your blood sugar how to use a cgm So check out my playlist for blood sugar [00:25:00] control to help you 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 JJVirgin.Com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don’t miss a single episode at subscribetoJJ.Com. See you next time.

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