I’m JJ 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. 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. Have we just gotten too comfortable? Uh, if you really think about what has happened, even over the last hundred years, or even over the last, like, couple decades, where we’ve got temperature controlled, Where we’ve got, you know, things doing the housework for us, like Roombas, where we can get food delivered in 30 minutes.

You know, I always say, the less you do, the less you can do. And, you know, a lot of this stuff just sets us up for having a lot of the different health problems we see, and probably why we’re seeing this thing. Exponential increase in obesity and diabetes and all of the lifestyle diseases. So we’re going to unpack that today with the co founder and CEO of Commune.

And his name is Jeff Krasno. I was fortunate to meet him through my buddy, Dr. David Perlmutter. And this is a super cool project that you are going to want to check out. In fact, you’re going to get a free 30 day membership to it. It’s a masterclass platform for personal and societal well being and all sorts of cool people are in there teaching classes like Dr.

Sarah Gottfried, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Jeff Bland, Dr. David Perlmutter, a lot of people you’ve seen, um, over here on the podcast and buddies. He also has a great podcast called Commune Podcast where he has interviewed, gosh, Gabor Amate and Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, and he also writes a weekly column called Commusings.

So he has been on his own personal health journey, even though he’s been in the field for decades as a, uh, physician. Running a yoga program, you’ll hear about his own transformation that started four years ago that is super cool. He is the creator of Good Stress, which is a collection of wellness protocols developed to reverse diabetes, lose, and this is by the way what he did, to reverse his diabetes, lose 60 pounds and get his health back at age 50.

And so we are going to be digging into what, like, what is creating the challenges we have for their health, but more importantly, what are some of the things that you can do? What are some of the things that you can do that you can start reversing this? And then habit stacking on this so that just like what Jeff did were, you know, four years later his health has completely transformed and happened fairly quickly.

You can do it too. I will be right back with Jeff. And I just want to give you this one website URL, because this is where I’m going to put your free membership. It will be at jjvirgin. com forward slash one commune. I’ll be right back with Jeff. Stay with me.

Jeff Krasno, welcome to the show. Super excited to hang out with you today.

Oh, JJ, it’s such a treat. Thanks for having me on and, uh, for letting me speak to your amazing community. Appreciate it.

Yes, well, what’s really interesting is so many of the things that we have created, like the modern day comforts, our culture, is really what’s undermining our health.

And so I don’t know really how to rectify that, but that’s what we’re going to dig in today too, is like what, like all these creature comforts, all the way that we live now, it’s kind of in stark contrast to our biology, our physiology. What we really need to be doing. So let’s dig into that. Um, and to start us off, like paint the picture for where we’re on, where we are now and how this is impacting our health.

Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So I think you’re, you put your thumb right on it. You know, our culture has in many ways. You know, nature makes mistakes in execution from time to time, right? There are mutations. But nature doesn’t really make mistakes in terms of design. And uh, you know, this organism and yours and everybody listening.

We are the product of millions of years of hominid evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of homo sapien evolution and over those massive swaths of time, we built up these adaptive mechanisms in relation to our environment. And, you know, our environment, for hundreds of thousands of years, honestly didn’t change that much.

Um, we had what I call Paleolithic stressors. You know, we were opportunistic omnivores, and we ate lots of plants, and tubers, and seeds, um, and, and occasional wild game. But we also really had to endure periods of calorie paucity or food scarcity. That was just simply customary as part of life. And we built adaptive mechanisms in our body around that.

It’s called storing fat. Um, like we, we love to vilify fat, right. And, and for many good reasons, um, But you know, it’s a, it’s a nice cushion and, um, it’s an endocrine organ, but really what it is, it’s just warehoused energy, right? And that was adaptive because, you know, in the fall, the body knew that winter’s fallow was right around the corner.

So it was like, uh, you know, my great, great, great, Great great great grandfather’s loincloth got a little tight in the fall for a good reason. Um, but of course, you know, in modern times, and this is just one example, uh, you know, we’ve engineered our lives for endless, cheap, shelf stable, nutrient deficient foodstuffs.

You know, endless calories. And when you don’t have those periods of scarcity and you’re only storing fat, well, guess what happens? You have a 45 percent obesity rate. You have an obesity crisis. And candidly, like that’s not a bug in the system. That is the normal and expected result of our paleolithic genome simply trying to cope with our lifestyle, with the way that we live our life.

And there’s so many examples of that phenomenon, essentially everywhere we look.

Yeah, I always like to say your body, your body does exactly what you’re telling it to do, right? And I think what’s interesting, and you hit on this, is if you look at the seasons, and then you look at like sunlight, and I’m not talking about like maybe if you lived in say Sweden or Iceland, you know, places that like these enormous swings in daylight and night throughout the year, but in the normal places, during the summer the days get longer.

And so you sleep less and because you’re sleeping less, you’re more insulin resistant. And by the way, it’s also the same time that we have fruit. And so now we’re eating more fruit. We are more insulin resistant. We’re storing more calories as fat. And then we go into the winter where we’re sleeping more, the days are shorter because we didn’t have lights.

So we’d be sleeping more, we’d be more insulin sensitive, we’d be able to use that stored fat for fuel, right? Like that’s just one of those examples of nature being super smart. Now we have lights, we have fruit year round, you know, besides the fact we have ultra processed is when we can totally go down into.

We also have All sorts of food variety all year round that we never would have had in, you know, easy amounts and we don’t have to do any work for it. Um, I’m trying to think of where I heard about just the amount of work we used to have to do just for food. I mean, I just think of even the amount of housework my mom used to do.

Versus now, like, you can have, what is it, a Zumba, the thing that goes around?

I don’t have one of those, but, you know, you’re absolutely right. In the palm of my hand, on a whim, I can order up a piece of fruit, uh, in or out of season. And have it delivered here by the time we finish our conversation. I mean, that’s crazy.

Um, and, uh, and really again, just that comfort and convenience upends our engineering. So you, you nailed it. You know, yeah, we become a little insulin resistant in the summer by design, you know, because instead of using that glucose or that fat for energy production, our body says, no, no, no. Store it away.

Because, you know, scarcity is a comet. And, and you’re right with fruit, for example, with fructose, which, you know, is a signal to the body. It’s, it’s, it tells the body also to become insulin resistant. Like, I’m sure you’ve talked to David Perlmutter about this, who wrote about, you know, uric acid and Rick Johnson, et cetera, is that we lost that gene to break down uric acid sometime, you know, 15 million years ago.

And that gene got silenced for very good reason because the ice age was coming down across Europe and the harvest calendar was shorter. So fructose was basically a sign, store fat, because the harvest season is so short now. And so again, you know, the body is, you know, when you unpack the wisdom in it, um, Um, it’s, again, it never really makes a mistake and, and, you know, a lot of people ask me and I know they ask you this all the time, like, how do I be healthy?

And I’ve started to try to answer that more simply because there’s so many different ways to do it. And the way I look at it is I asked myself, well, how did I evolve, right? So you said like, how hard did I actually have to work for food? Well, I walked 10 miles a day. Right? I mean, and the Hazda, and the, uh, and the Kung people, the kind of last remaining hunter gatherer tribes.

Um, you know, they’re walking still six to eight miles a day. Um, and so, you know, you ask yourself, well, what should I be doing in terms of exercise? Well, again, how did I evolve? I walked a lot. I had to carry heavy things. Things from , you know, from time to time. , uh, every once in a while, maybe against my will, I had to break into a sprint if I was being, you know, chased by an ungulate or something.

So, you know, these are sometimes the, the answers are, are hidden, you know? Right. Uh, in plain sight.

I was fortunate, um, gosh, I think it was 20 years ago I was sitting in a lecture. I don’t know if you’ve, I’ve ever heard Dr. Lauren Cordain speak. Do you know who he is?

Just by name, but that’s it.

So, 20 years ago I was in this little group, I think maybe there were 12 people, and Dr.

Loren Cardate, and they’d hired him to do a lecture on Paleolithic nutrition, and I, it was like my, I thought my head was going to blow off, I was like, this is so fascinating. But when you think about it, and go, okay, we’re still basically 10, 000 years old, and yet now we’re in this, It’s a time where everything is completely opposite to what our bodies were designed to do, how we were designed to move, eat, and, and so if you can go back and look and, and to make the best of your, like, guesses as to what things were like back then in terms of how we ate, how we lived, the type of stressors we were under, the toxins we might have been assaulted with, you know, and you look at what’s going on now and with so many of these diseases that are purely.

Created diseases based on, like, a wrong lifestyle.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s amazing. Our hunter gatherer ancestors, they did die much earlier than we did. Their life expectancy was anywhere around the mid thirties, let’s say. And even at the, you know, the top of the 20th century in 1900, I think it was maybe 46 or 48 years.

So. But of course, the reason for that is that, you know, we hadn’t solved for infection or infant mortality or infectious disease and communicable diseases. You know, modern medicine to its credit has actually done a fairly decent job, um, with, you know, tending to, to, to smallpox, for example, that killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

Right now, in 2024, we are choosing. The way that we die, um, and, and not, you know, often with abundant thoughtfulness, you know, all of these chronic diseases, um, the diabetes, heart disease, stroke, uh, dementia, Alzheimer’s, neurodegenerative diseases, all these. These are really products of culture. You know, when you look at the rates of these diseases 50, 60 years ago, they’re basically non existent.

You know, there was a little cancer back in, you know, the hunter gatherer days, not very much, but all of those other chronic diseases didn’t exist. And even 50 or 60 years ago, they didn’t really exist in great numbers. So our, our genome obviously doesn’t change in 50 years. So what’s up? It’s, it’s such an obvious answer.

It’s the way that we’re living. It’s how we’re choosing to live. And that is bad news and good news at the same time, because when we understand the nature of our organism and how we’re engineered, uh, we do actually have a lot of agency over Our behaviors and our, and our exposome and, and, and can align ourselves with our engineering.

Cool. So let’s unpack, like, I’m going to go through one by one and we can unpack, like, why is this a challenge? How does this help? And, you know, as you were talking about that, I was just thinking about the, I don’t remember who the doctor was, but it was a, it was like, I think 60 minutes and they were talking about the new weight loss drugs.

And this doctor was talking how weight loss, obesity was genetic. And I thought, you know what? How could that be? When, when one half percent of the population in the 1900s was obese, and now it’s 45%, how could that be a genetic situation? How could it be? Come on.

Come

on. Right?

Yeah. No, clearly there are predispositions to store fat in some cases, you know, there’s this case for the thrifty gene or whatever, but you’re a hundred percent right.

You know, this is not, um, a genetic phenomenon. And you don’t need to be an evolutionary biologist to figure that out. Um, you can just look at, at basic common sense. Um, I think there’s also, you know, I think it was in 2013, the, um, the AMA classified, You know, obesity as a disease, and you know, there was a lot of disagreement around that, but you know, the categorization of this as a disease, A, sort of, in some ways, relieves people of the responsibility that they have, because they just feel like, oh, well, I’m a victim, like it’s a disease, and then obviously enables pharmaceutical companies to, well, It enables us to label it as a disease and then treat it as a disease, um, you know, often with, with cocktails of, of drugs and obviously, you know, that’s a big topic today.

So, but we don’t have to get into that one. Yeah.

That and health at any size is just hurting people. It’s a disservice. And, you know, I realized, you know, we could step into it a little bit and people might get mad, but I ultimately am here for, you know, team humanity and how can we help people the most.

And by giving them misinformation and trying to make things okay, that doesn’t help. And, you know, you look at something like obesity and, uh, You know, I think step one is not only do we have food available at all times, I mean now I can get food delivered in under an hour and pretty much anything that you want, but we also have this rise of ultra processed foods.

Yeah, absolutely. And candidly, I wouldn’t take stress and trauma out of the equation. I mean, you know, food is a salve. It’s an emotional and psychological salve. Um, it, it triggers the same reward systems in the brain, um, you know, as, as drugs and, and exercise and all of these other things. Um, and it wasn’t around as a salve.

You know, in the way, in the way it is now for, for thousands and thousands of years. And so, I mean, I look at, and this is very personal for me because I grew up as an extremely overweight kid up until four years ago. Uh, you know, I was 210 pounds really before you knew me. And, you know, I was borderline diabetic.

You know, my, my fasting glucose was 125 milligrams per deciliter. My hemoglobin A1C was 6. 7%, so I was like, not in great shape. Uh, so I can speak from a good deal of personal experience. And candidly, I was, you know, always suffering as a kid. I had a lot of, you know, difficulty moving around the world, being chubby, not really fitting in.

Um, and you know, I ate my feelings. And I carried that into adulthood. Um, and it wasn’t really until I kind of, the light bulb went off around a lot of the things, honestly, that we’re talking about, that like I started to become like an intermittent faster, for example. And when I couldn’t just mindlessly wander over to the cupboard and pick up a bag of chips, I had to examine the nature of that hunger, of that stimulus and delineate whether or not it was A biological need or a psychological or emotional desire.

And once I became sort of a disciple to that practice, uh, I, I started to untangle and delineate between those two things. And I started to make unconscious behavior conscious such that then I could change my habits. And for me, that, that was huge. And it wasn’t just, it, for me, it’s fasting started with food.

But then I was able to impose that scarcity on other parts of my life. Um, you know, whether that was like digital devices or, you know, shopping and, and also find that mindset between stimulus, um, like Viktor Frankl, I think famously said, like, Between stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space lies our freedom and liberation.

So, you know, I was able to find that space such that when other aggravating things happen in my life, I have three kids, they’re always doing things to annoy me. What’s aggravating

there? Come on. Yeah,

they’re always doing things to annoy me, but instead of just reacting and And having an outsized, um, response, you know, to their behavior, I found I was able to refine that skill and find that space and ask myself, what is the nature of their behavior?

Why are they acting this way? What is the appropriate response? And so, you know, this is a place where, for example, self imposed scarcity became really, really useful for me.

There’s a lot in what you just said, like a lot of great life lessons. What, was there a catalyst, like a turning point? Like you said this was four years ago, and you’re right, like I know you as you now.

Um, and there’s so much when someone makes the shifts in terms of shifting self identity. What, what was the turning point? Like what made you start to look at this?

Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting because, like, JJ, like, So many of the people listening to this, you know, I had these symptoms that were so common and anodyne that essentially we’ve completely normalized them.

I had, you know, chronic fatigue, brain fog, you know, irritability. You know, insomnia, um, these things that are completely, honestly abnormal, but we’ve made them completely normal. And they’re so, because they’re normal, they’re so easy to just sort of write off. Oh, I just had a bad day, you know, but really they were just upstream from the realization that I got was, you know, I put a continuous glucose monitor on my triceps and I stared into the app and I was like, that can’t be right.

You know, I’m Jeff Krasnow. I ran a yoga festival for 10 years. You know, I shop at Whole Foods, you know, I pay my taxes and raise my children. I’m a good guy. I can’t be a statistic. And lo and behold, you know, I was essentially borderline pre, uh, borderline diabetic at the highest level of prediabetes. And you know, I also had plenty of insults to my vanity.

I had like, you know, dad bod, so I had, you know, the inner tube here and the, uh, you know, what’s clinically known as gynecomastia, but I’m sure more known in your world as, as man boobs and, and other sort of just insults to the way I looked, but it was really, you know, At 49, discovering that I had metabolic dysfunction and not, and not in the early chapters of it.

And then, you know, knowing what’s downstream from that. And, uh, and then I got COVID really early on. In February, March 2020, even kind of a little bit before we knew what it was, and um, and I got really sick. And um, and I had symptoms that, that lasted for months. I had like low grade chronic fevers, etc.

And as I began to learn more about COVID and who it impacted more severely than other people, I was like, whoa, I’m that statistic again. Because if you looked, if you started to actually unpack the, the COVID statistics, the severe contractions that led to death and hospitalizations And severe cases were disproportionate, uh, among people with metabolic disease, either diabetes or obesity, et cetera.

And I was in that camp and, um, and at that juncture, I felt like I really, I just needed to take agency and control over my own life. Um, and I started to slowly stack, you know, these protocols until, um, But here’s the amazing thing, is that it didn’t take long, and like the body was really, my body was really dying to heal.

And, and many of your listeners may, may, um, resonate with this, because I always associated health with downward spirals. But I found an upward spiral in my health. As I started to institute these protocols, it was wild. I just started to gain back energy, gain back ability to focus. I read in 2018, I think I read zero books.

Since that time, I think I’ve read 500 books. And it was really because I didn’t have the ability to focus or concentrate even for a minute. So there were so many knock on impacts of this upward spiral that I was fortunate enough to get into.

You know, I think that most people have gotten to a point, cause these things happen over time.

It’s not like you wake up one day and go, Oh my gosh, my blood sugar is like nearly diabetic. It’s like these little creepy things where you get a little more tired, a little less focused, you know, and moving a little slower. And I think what we’ve really gotten so far away from is knowing what feeling normal really feels like.

And then you see all the commercials of like, you know, I mean, or, or go to, uh, CBS or Walgreens and there’s walls of things for GI issues and pain and inflammation and headaches. And you’re like, okay, you know, and it’s like, we forget that those are actually not normal. I had a mentor early on. He goes, you know, it’s not normal.

Cause every year. I would get sick in February and I’d get sick in February because I worked in weight loss and January was chaos. And so February I would get sick and I thought it was normal.

And then that’s not

normal.

No, not, not normal at all. Yeah. I think, you know, um, as you’re, as you say, like these diseases of modernity are, they’re furtive.

And in nature, you know, they’re incredibly progressive. I think there’s a great Hemingway quote on how you go broke very gradually and then suddenly, you know,

the other side of it is the stress side of it, which you talked about the stress and trauma, which if you go back, you know, a thousand years, you either have Survive the infection or the attack or the childbirth or you didn’t.

There was no chronic stress going on really, right?

Yeah, we we were able to metabolize stress quickly, really. It’s like, um, I went for a hike here just like last week right before a podcast, which I like to go clear my head and I have these wonderful trails just right up here and on my way back There was, uh, like a rustling in the, in the bramble, and then like a coyote plopped right down, you know, in front of me about like 10 yards.

And, um, and of course, like what happened to my body? Like I had the totally normal involuntary stress response. Like my heart started pounding. I was talking to my mom, actually, at the time I hung up on her right away. Sorry. Sorry, mom. Um, and you know, my heart started pounding, my breath rate increased, uh, my, my pupils dilated, became very, very focused.

And, um, And of course like under the crust of consciousness, there’s all these things happening that I know about like, you know Cortisol was coursing through my brain So it’s time my liver to release glucose to send to my extremities to like fight or flight classic response, right? And I kind of had a moment of a standoff.

I didn’t really fight didn’t flight either but you know And the coyote sort of like looked at me and was like no you’re not gonna be lunch today And just kind of like You know, sidled off into the woods and two minutes later, you know, I had, uh, I bounced back. I returned to homeostasis. And that’s what the body is really engineered to do normally is always return to middle.

Always, you know, find that equilibrium, temperature control, you know, acid alkaline balance. We’re so engineered for, for, um, for homeostasis. And I had a normal. You know, stress response, and it came and went, but that was very, very normal in paleolithic times. Now, the coyote never leaves. Really, you know, in modern society and it takes the form of, you know, 24 hour news, you know, incessant social media that is actually designed to leverage your human negativity bias around fear and outrage.

And you’re in a constant sympathetic overload, your constant amygdala hijack. And we, we know, What happens there? We know it happens physically there, you know, with chronically elevated cortisol levels, which can sometimes invert, you know, and be chronically low cortisol levels, but it disrupts, you know, gut function.

Uh, it disrupts immune function. It disrupts blood glucose. Uh, balance, all these things, but it also disrupts social function because when you kind of think about what happens when you have a stress response, you know, like I said, you know, your, your pupils dilate, but what’s really happening is your aperture is, and your attention is getting super narrow and you become very self obsessed and you distrust the world around you and you see the world as a threat.

And for, and that’s completely adaptive on the Serengeti, completely adaptive. But in modern society, it’s not, you know, we, we end up, we wonder why we have no social trust and that that’s completely eroded that, you know, we are self obsessed and, um, and. And it’s a lot of it has to do with the fact that we’re in this constant cycle of chronic distress.

So you’ve had the great fortune, because you had a yoga company for years, then you had this health epiphany, you went through that, and now you’ve got this commune business where you are We have some of the most amazing health and wellness experts in the world who are teaching. So you’ve got access to the best.

That’s right. And, right? I

mean, it’s like, what a, what a great thing you designed for yourself here.

Well, yeah, yeah. You pulled back the curtain there, you know, it partially is for myself. Um, but obviously, it’s, it’s, it’s for everybody. It’s

for everybody, but we do build the businesses we want for ourselves, I hope.

I mean, that’s kind of like step one of marketing. And, you know, I would hope that you’re also benefiting from it, but I think what’s interesting is we’ve identified these These issues, whether it’s social media, social isolation from that, you know, being very comfortable, having like temperature control, having too much access to ultra processed food, having chronic stress and trauma.

We have all of these things. Now that you’ve had the opportunity to like be in, learn from so many different experts, what has that, how has that bled over into your Routine. Like what do you do now? Because you know all of this stuff. And now you’ve managed to maintain like you’re super healthy. You’ve maintained a weight loss, which is one of the hardest things to do.

Like it’s like you’re a unicorn if you’re able to do this basically in our society. So what have you learned and how has it, what does it, how’s that impacted your routine?

Yeah. I have to grow a little horn on my, Um, Yeah, I mean, I’m incredibly lucky. I get to interview and talk to folks like you and many of our colleagues for a living.

And, um, and then, yeah, I have this amazing property up in Topango where So many people come and visit and

I hope I get invited to actually go to that some point. What’s it called? I mean,

it’s an open invitation. Um, and yeah, I’ve, I’ve been able to, you know, distill 500 interviews, um, into a series of protocols that I adopted.

I, you know, Like you, I do a tremendous amount of me search, right? I’m constantly trying things and I’m curious and I’m, you know, jumping into my own end of one Petri dish. Um, and so, you know, my, uh, for me, what I, I started to think about, um, my protocols as sort of good stress. So flipping that script on chronic pain, Distress and self imposing these short-term acute paleolithic stress stressors.

And you know, some people call them adversity mimetics. Some people call it eustress. Some people call it like hormesis. Essentially any activity that pushes the edges of my comfort that has. That confers positive benefits. And very quickly, I discovered that, you know, doing hard things, you know, not only makes other hard things easier, but actually has incredible benefits for longevity, for resilience.

Um, I mean, as you know, quite, um, personally, probably the most overt example of good stress is like overloading a muscle. Until those microfibers rip. And then giving it rest and with enough protein, what happens, that muscle rebounds and grows bigger. And that is like some homely definition of hypertrophy.

That applies to so many areas of your life. And um, and so that’s what, what I started to do. So part of my routine. Is daily, well, first of all, I wake up and I get outside and, you know, I think there’s a lot of people that have been very articulate about, you know, light therapy. Again, I see this as part of our evolution.

Like we slept outside or in very, very humble little lean tos and huts. We got outside with morning light and we were able to get that, you know, band of, of blue light between nanometers in the inferior part of our retina. And that sets off this endocrine cascade, as you well know, that, uh, that triggers melatonin some 14 hours later and helps us to sleep.

And so getting outside first thing in the morning to start that cascade and set, you know, your circadian rhythm properly, that’s, uh, that’s part of my daily routine. Um, I’m fortunate enough to work at home, so. You know, I, I have a heat therapy and cold therapy practice, um, kind of every morning, quite early, you know, probably like six 30.

So not like crazy, not like five, but, um, but six 30 cause I still have three daughters and, um, I like to see them in the morning. And so I try to do this before they get off to school. Um, And, uh, so I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be in the sauna for, you know, 20 minutes at 190 degrees, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Try to do that, you know, five or six times a week for sure.

And, you know, do the whole contrast, uh, bathing routine. I have a cold plunge. I hate the cold, but I’ve learned to embrace it. Um, and. And that was honestly where I saw a ton of change in, in my physical body and in my, in my basic metabolic and sort of my, what I would probably call my basal metabolic rate.

Although this is, that’s just instinctual, but where I really saw this, JJ, what was, you know, I was in a fasting protocol. So I wouldn’t have eaten, you know, for 14 hours or something and then I would get into the cold. And what would happen there? So as soon as I got into the cold, obviously my core body temperature would plummet and all my mitochondria and my brown fat would say, okay, we got to heat Jeff back up into the Goldilocks zone.

So we got to get them back up to around 98. 6, you know, let’s make some energy. And then they would like look around and be like, well, what are the energy substrates available? And at that juncture, because I would be in a fasting protocol, I’d have very, very, very low glucose, uh, blood glucose. So my mitochondria would look around and say, okay, well, there’s not really any glucose.

What are we going to do? We’re going to oxidize fat and we’re going to break down triglycerides into free fatty acids. So we’re going to use that fat.

And I, what I found was that cold therapy in the morning before breaking a fast, I just like, boy, my, my body just almost changed in front of my eyes. It was incredible. Um, so that was a protocol stack that I found to be particularly impactful. Um, yeah, I don’t know if that’s, if that’s, uh, uh, a practice that you do.

I do it too. Um, I feel the same way. I, I always say like what I hate the most is being cold. Yeah. I live in Florida for a reason. Um, we have two saunas at home. We have an infrared, a sunlighten, and that’s our evening. One that we will do. That’s if we want to watch Netflix, we got to do it in the sauna.

Then, yeah, we got the one, the fast heat one that goes up to 180, it does not go up to 200. And so we go into that one. I’ll do that little one which it’s a little seated one and then go into the cold plunge. And, uh, I do not like being cold. However, it feels It feels amazing. And that’s, and I so agree with you.

And I think it’s a really important thing to get is when you do hard things in that type of controlled environment, you know, it translates over into all other areas of your life. It’s same with resistance training, right? You do hard things. Like I hate, Sprinting. And so that’s another thing that I’m doing.

I got a sprint treadmill. That was my 60th birthday present was a sprint treadmill. Cause I was like, hate sprinting, don’t like running. I’m going to do that. That’s what I’ll do. Right. So it’s, you’re so dry, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and, and there’s obviously the physical. And then, you know, there’s a very, very significant psychological component that you just pointed to.

So, like, getting in the cold, it’s honestly not that different than the coyote, candidly. What happens? You get in the cold, and you’re like, You know, it takes your breath away, right? And your heart starts pounding, and you get this, Epinephrine rush and you feel like a sense of panic bubbling up, right? And then you have this space of like, okay, can I use conscious breath or leverage my neomammalian prefrontal cortex to push top down pressure on top of this involuntary bottom up response?

And as you refine that capability, By doing this practice over and over again, what you find is, is that you are more resilient and able to emotionally regulate in other parts of your life. That that practice punctuates the rest of your life, such that if you get, Encounter a stressful situation, which inevitably you do, then you have that skill to push that back down.

And that is so useful. So it’s not just about like what happens in the cold at that time. It’s how it really punctuates and spills into the other parts of your life. Um, and I, you know, I totally, you know, like with, with resistance training, for example, like, um, I never was a squatter. Um, I just, that was, that was my, what, what would sprints are to, to JJ, squats were to Jeff.

I just never was never part of my deal, but I’m a competitive tennis player. So my friend Light Watkins, uh, got me started squatting. And I became kind of like almost quasi addicted to it. At first, like I couldn’t get down at all. My knees were hurting, popping and cracking and all this stuff. Um, and, uh, And then, you know, over time, I just got better at it.

And boy, did I notice it on the tennis court. Especially did I notice it in the third set of very, very competitive matches, where I was like, whoa, I’m not going anywhere. And where that bled into my psychology. Is like, I would go out and play very, very good players, but there was a confidence that built up because of my physiological training.

It spilled over into this confidence where it’s like, you’re not going to beat me because in the third set, I’m still going to be all here. And that That created a sense of ease and flow for me on the tennis court that was really powerful. So this was like where, you know, your physiology and training your physiology spills over into your psychology, uh, all the time.

And you know what’s fun is that could translate into really being a metaphor for life. Because what I look at now as I go, I am more fired up. To be like, I just turned 61 and I’m more fired up about like, what can I accomplish now? Like, how can I be now? What can I do now? And I’m actually pushing myself more now than I ever did in my fifties.

I was like, honestly, a little bit in a rut in my forties and fifties. And now I’m like, Game on. And it all compounds. It’s like interest. Just like you said, you do the, you do the cold and you go, okay, that was hard. What else can I do? That’s hard. I’ll go do the sprint. That’s hard. Okay. I’ll do squats. And you know, what I really like to think about is quite often we’ll start to look at these things and go, Oh, my knees hurt.

So I shouldn’t do that. And, uh, or I’ve got a bad back, so I shouldn’t squat. And I think, you know, The reality is actually the opposite. That those reasons we’re saying we can’t do it, why we shouldn’t do it, actually are the reasons why we should, because these are the things that are going to carry us through in life.

Cause in life you have to squat, right?

Well, again, of course, you’re asking yourself that question. How did we evolve? We were squatting all the time, all the time. And you know, one thing that I will, uh, I will say that I do think that’s important is when you get into a cold plunge, you don’t get into a 34 degree plunge the first time.

I don’t ever get into a 34 degree plunge. Yeah.

Fair enough. But the point is, is like, well, with cold, it’s actually really interesting because it’s totally subjective, right? So you can get all the benefits from a 59 degree water if it feels cold. But I guess what I’m saying is, you know, we start Easy and small, and we make it a practice.

Like I wasn’t doing, you know, 30 squats with a ton of weight, you know, the first day. I was doing just basic air squats holding on to a dance bar. You know, I couldn’t get my heels anywhere close to the ground, but you just start and you just say, today I’m gonna be a little bit uncomfortable, and the next day maybe a little bit more.

And with, you know, cold, you can increase duration and decrease temperature. You know, there’s all these ways to continue to sort of attenuate or dial up and titrate the, the level of discomfort, but just become very comfortable with that discomfort because you know that there’s just so much freedom on the other side of it.

Yes, beautifully said. Now I’d love to tell everyone about Commune. Um, I know we’re going to give a, a 30 day guest pass to everyone. So talk about Commune, like, you know, what made you start it? What is it? How will it benefit them?

Totally. Well, Commune is It could really be best understood as the masterclass for well being.

So, you know, we have a platform with 150 courses, uh, with the best, most prolific, respected teachers, authors, um, Wellness practitioners, you included, um, and you know, many of the folks that you’ve had on your show, Mark Hyman and David Perlmutter and, uh, Jeffrey Bland and kind of just the pantheon of functional medicine folks, um, Gabby Reese and Jillian Michaels, et cetera.

So across, across the whole board. And it’s really a place to go for holistic well being. Um, it’s, you know. Yoga, meditation, nutrition, really everything that people need to be holistically well. So, you know, it’s just at onecommune. com and um, yeah, I really encourage people to, to get over there and try it out.

There’s really something for everyone and it just kind of meets people where

they are. Cool. I love that because, you know, I think that it can be intimidating sometimes to think about where you get started. And the most important thing is just to start. And if that means that you just started, you were walking 2, 500 steps a day and now you’re doing 4, 000, awesome.

If that means that you start eating a little more protein, awesome. Awesome. You know, it’s like just get started and continue to push, you know, push a little bit more out of that comfort zone. Just like you talked about, I’m going to put this at jjvirgin. com forward slash one commune. And that will be that free 30 day pass to get into the commune courses.

And again, just like you said, like you’ve, you’ve got amazing instructors in there. So it’s a great place to come in and just pick one and Start moving forward and then all of a sudden you’ll look back and I look back at you like, you know, you just Progress, progress, progress. And at some point I got to see pictures of the old Jeff.

Cause I said, I’ll send some

over.

My wife has combed through them. She’s like, you can share that one, but not that one.

No, that’s the one you do want to share.

I know. I know I’ll work on it. You

know, we’re all, we’re all a work in progress. That’s the most important thing. It’s like, yeah, that’s

totally it. There’s no terminus, you know, we, we don’t get to quote unquote wholeness.

But what we do want to do is heal and really healing is just that journey towards wholeness. And, you know, one thing that I’ve learned is that we have more agency over that than we ever thought we did, you know, the The last 50 years of the 20th century was sort of dominated by genetic determinism. It’s sort of, we were, you know, dealt a hand of cards and, you know, that’s what we had to play with.

And what we’ve learned in the last, you know, 20 years or so through neuroplasticity and the microbiome and epigenetics and all these really just fascinating emerging fields in medical science is that we are not fixed at all. We are a constant process changing it. Every moment, 37 billion, billion chemical reactions per second in relation to our environment.

And that is scary, but it’s also really empowering because we do have agency. I sometimes call this the age of agency. And, uh, and everyone can take that power back away from, you know, whether it’s like the pharmaceutical industry or the kind of conventional medical, uh, Industry, and take that power back into your own hands and become, you know, the CEO of your own healthcare.

And, it’s so much easier to do when you’ve got one commune.

Yes.

Like, you’re making it easy. There you go. Thank you for all the work you’re doing, because it is, it’s fantastic. I love what you’re doing. And I appreciate you so much.

Yeah, likewise, likewise. Yeah, your, your message is so powerful and, uh, you know, there’s not a day that goes by.

Um, that your name doesn’t come up in some conversation that I’m having. Um, so you’ve just made such an imprint. So thanks.

Well, how cool is that? Thank you. Appreciate it.

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 And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review.

Your reviews make a big difference in 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.

If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other health care professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes.

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