Aging Is Optional: The Fast-Twitch Muscle Secret

Aging Powerfully and Building Muscle 0:00

The reason why it's aging powerfully is, again, the biggest thing we lose is we age is our power. And so physically we're losing our power, but I feel like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. It's like it becomes a mental thing too, right? And really that comes from your fast-twitch muscle fibers. So that's where it all comes from is I was like power really comes from like let's make sure what we're doing as we age is we're leaning into building fast twitch muscle fibers because you see what they talk about as you age oh you should just walk.

This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. So today I am here with JJ Virgin and we're gonna be talking about aging powerfully. She's been an expert in simply just health, wellness, nutrition, and how to do it well for a while because she's one of the people that I actually first read a book of in the health space. I know that's so fun. And now we're talking about aging powerfully. So I know your target audience is women. and you help to empower them to just become their best selves, feel good, become free from the shackles of a lot of noise that's out there.

So what would you say is one of the most important or powerful levers that you can pull to age powerfully? It's probably not what you think I'm going to say. So the big thing I like to say now is forget aging gracefully, age powerfully. And the reason I'm saying that is as I started to look at what we need to do as we age, obviously the big thing we need to do as we age is to lean into muscle and strength and power because starting around age 30, we're losing up to 1% of our muscle mass each year.

We're losing twice as much strength and three times as much power. This is a major problem. And the reason it's a major problem for women is because For years, women have chosen skinny over strong, right? And as I'm looking through all of this research and starting to talk to women about the importance of putting on muscle. Now, mind you, I started lifting weights when I was 16, and I've been taking people, you know, helping them lift weights since, for 40 years now, for a long time, right? And but for 40 years I've heard, I don't want to get big.

And I just kind of had this epiphany where I went, you know what? A, in your wildest dreams, you'd be able to get big. You should be trying to pack on as much muscle as humanly possible. And if it was 10 pounds in a year, it would be incredible. And you would be smaller because muscles, metabolic spanx. But I thought, you know what, what would happen if you did get big, if you did get powerful, if you did show up stronger? It's like you've been trying to shrink, play small, be skinny your whole life.

Like, if not now, when? You know, I love that statement because on my wall at my clinic, it says, are you strong enough to live your life? And it was a custom made sign that one of my team built. And it's because I would say that to people all the time. I would have, Grandma's coming in, hurting their backs, feeling worn out right after they became your grandma. And I was just like, that baby is too much for you to pick up. Yeah, so you gotta train for that baby. So that's why I say that the thing for me, the number one thing is this mindset.

And I heard this study and it said people who are excited about aging, lives seven and a half years longer than people who don't. So that woman who's now excited about having grandkids, because I think they're going to be way more fun than kids, I just sense that. Although I love my kids, I'm like, when's someone going to give me a grandkid? But if I want to be able to pick up my grandkids, run after my grandkids, play with them, I have to be doing the things like you talked about with the sign that are going to allow me to do that.

If I'm not training doing a deadlift, I'm not picking baby off the floor.

Protein Needs and Muscle Preservation 4:06

My mother has had a myriad of all of the lifestyle-based illnesses that we see in every westernized country that are just becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. There's a whole story behind it that I'm not going to take time for today, but she was misdiagnosed having diabetes, put on 100 pounds, crashed and burned her health. She has never been the same since then. She was 40 then, she's over 60 now. But after I had a kid. The lights just came on in her life. She is up, she's moving, she's excited.

And I have a gym in my basement and I go down there and work out and now my kid is dangling from the bar and he's got his own little one pound dumbbells and he's taking them to grandma. He's giving them to grandma and grandma will do it for him. She won't do it for me. He's the perfect personal trainer. And she's down there walking on the treadmill with him. And she's grabbing the band and doing exercises with him. And he's stoked. And she's moving. And you can just see the vitality coming back to her.

And I'm trying to get more. I'm always wanting more. I'm trying to hear a little more. But when she started moving, just like her skin looks better. Her hair looks better. Her happiness is better. And everyone in the family can see it. So living powerfully, I love that statement, that change, because so many women have told me too, when they come in, I don't want to get too big. And I'm like, I'm not a small guy, and I work hard for it. I know, I am killing it. They'll go, listen, I don't want to get big.

I just want to have arms like yours. Yeah. I'm like, all right, well, today I did four sets of eight pull-ups, four sets of 30 push-ups. I did some bent over rows with super heavy dumbbells. They're like, oh, so this just isn't going to happen. And here's the thing. And the reason why it's aging powerfully is, again, the biggest thing we lose is we age is our power. And so physically, we're losing our power. But I feel like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. It becomes a mental thing, too, right?

And really, that comes from your fast-twitch muscle fibers. So that's where it all comes from is I was like power really comes from like let's make sure what we're doing as we age is we're leaning into building fast twitch muscle fibers because you see what they talk about as you age. Oh, you should just walk. Do some Pilates. I'm like, that's going to actually make this worse. Not saying don't do those things, but don't do those things and not do the resistance training and the power training because this will just make you slower.

This will make you lose more fast twitch. it makes you worse, not better. So yes, walk, move a lot. We all need to be moving a lot more, but I consider walking flossing. You know, like get those steps in. But let's get in some high intensity interval training. Let's get in some resistance training. Let's add the power back in. Because when you do hard things in life, like at the gym, it shows you can do hard things. Absolutely. I read a study that says something like 95, 99%. I can't remember the exact number of people over the age of 30 will never sprint.

Oh, I saw that. You saw the study because I saw the meme online and I'm like, I could never find a study to back it up. I read somewhere where they had a little bit of data with it. I don't know if it was anything worth talking about, but I'm just like, it makes sense. Well, I thought about that after I saw that meme and I'm like, well, the last time I sprinted was my kid's soccer game where they got the adults out there. And I, of course, the adults are so competitive, right? You know, the kids kick our butt and I pulled my hamstring and I was like, all right, that was the last time I sprinted.

After I saw that meme, I bought a sprint treadmill. And I am now doing, like, my intervals for that one are one minute sprint, one minute walk, one minute sprint, one minute walk. I was like, oh, that's not gonna be me. And it's fantastic using one of these sprint treadmills, because they're those self-propelled ones, and so they're very soft on your joints. Because I blew out my knee at 17, so I've had, I put off till 50 a knee replacement, but I had to have it. So I'd have a knee and a hip, because of the way that I'd moved, and I broke a foot.

doing gymnastics at 20. But that's the point. People will tell you, oh, I can't squat because I have a bad knee. Oh, I can't do this because I have a bad back. Having those injuries early on was one of the things that really got me into this field. And it was why I did squats and why I did step ups and why I was able to not have a knee replacement for 30 years after they told me I needed one. that is a big motivator for us is you can either choose to lay down literally and not do anything or you can choose to adapt and overcome when it comes to injuries.

I've had my fair share of shoulder surgery, multiple knee dislocations. I can't squat the same as I did and I'm not old, but I can't squat the same as I did in high school. I'm in my 30s and I still have to modify, but I can still work out and working out and there's so much data out there on muscle mass equals health. There just is, it's everywhere, it's indisputable. But to have muscle mass, you also have to have some level of nutrition. So when we're talking about women, women over 40, What type of nutrition are you recommending?

So the typical woman over 40 is not meeting the RDI of protein. The RDI protein, as we know, is completely underestimated because it's based on nitrogen excretion, which lowballs how much protein we need, and was based on young men. When we start to get 30 plus, and especially if we haven't been exercising, you know, I look at a lot of these statistics and I go, all right, but what about the person who has been working out, the person who is eating a lot of protein? So this would be different, I'm sure.

But the average person, since only 20% of the people are meeting the basic CDC exercise guidelines, which are the basic, it's kind of like the RDI for exercise, right? So we have most people not, right? we're going to need to overcome what's called anabolic resistance, which it's almost like protein resistance, like insulin resistance, where our body isn't able to take that protein and use it as efficiently to go through muscle protein synthesis. So we need more, not less. And yet, we've got such an emphasis on plant-based diets, And so you have people not hitting what they need.

Not saying you couldn't do it on a plant-based diet, but boy, you have to be a very good food biochemist to do it. So basically, I went through all the protein research to go how much, if I'm going to put my stake in the ground of how much protein should you have, I put it at 0.7 grams per pound of target body weight as the lowest end with one gram And by the way, you can go higher. I eat about a pound of 1.5 grams per pound of target body weight, but you could go higher than that. All this weird fear around protein.

It's so bizarre to me. It's like I had someone DM me on Instagram going, my manicurist. said that you can't absorb more than 27 grams of protein in a meal. Like, A, why are you asking your manicurist? B, there was a study that Luke Van Loon did that showed you could do 100 grams. And who knows past that? Because that's what the study was. Maybe it's 200. Maybe there's no upper limit. Who knows? You know, I've heard what the manicurist said.

GLP-1s, Metabolism, and Weight Loss Resistance 12:00

I don't know where, probably in a meme. And it was interesting because I was like, how does a bodybuilder get all this protein in that's eating two and 300 because they're huge guys, right? And why is it that a five foot hundred pound girl and a six foot five, 300 pound man, 27 grams, it's not going to be the same. But here's what I do. I run a tremendous amount of labs on people. And I always want to know what their diets are. They're coming in and we're looking at their hormones, their toxins, their mitochondrial function, their nutrient absorption, their hair tissue mineral, their urine.

Like we've got all this data. And men are coming in with fatigue and brain fog. And I only use men in this example because there's a marker for men, testosterone, that is really easy to test, pretty cheap. And for men, it's kind of simple. If their testosterone's high, and they're not aromatizing it into estrogen, making it into estrogen, they usually feel pretty good. And all these men are coming in that are listening to mainstream and doing these vegan diets. Because they got to keep mTORLO. They got to keep mTORLO.

And not realizing it's a tissue specific thing. And their testosterone is like 80, 200 maybe. And any man below 500 doesn't feel well. And I go, well, I'm not going to tell you that you have to go carnivore. But what I'm going to say is you probably need more meat in your diet, more protein. And almost every time, universal result here, you get a guy to go from 200 to five or 600 just by taking their diet from plant-based to like 20% meat. And it does matter. In my experience, the meat has to be quality.

It can't be deli meat. It can't be sliced sodium deli meat. It has to be, in my opinion, a grass fed, at least most of its life. It can maybe some be grain finished, but good quality meats. And here goes testosterone. And I make those, I can say those numbers, which just makes it a little bit more real, but it works in women too, not raising their testosterone massively, but just balancing hormones and allowing for them to feel good. Yeah, well, I also think with the men, I was coaching these, I was working on a reality show where they were going to create the next heavyweight champion of the world.

And I actually used to coach a bunch of heavyweight champs, one of my past careers. And these guys had all decided to start using soy milk. I'm like, dudes, do you know what that is doing to your testosterone? I'm like, no, soy milk for you. No, no. So yeah, it's interesting because if all you had someone do was keep everything the same in terms of caloric load and you had them just start to add in, swap out some of the carbs or fat for some clean protein, They'll lose weight initially just from that.

They'll probably cut their calories, too, because they'll be more satiated. But they'll lose weight just because the higher thermic effect of protein. I've seen that. And they won't lose muscle mass. That's the other key. It's like you're eating more protein. You're able to hold on to your fat-free mass as you're losing fat. And it's my biggest frustration with this misinformation campaign about GLP-1s is You know, it's like they're making you lose muscle mass and go, no, the poorly designed diet is what's making you lose muscle mass.

Let's get really clear on what the problems are here. Always start with designing the diet correctly. And it seems like in the diet wars, it's always about warring between fat and carbs. It's like, well, you miss the most important macronutrient, like fix that one first. I have seen exactly what you're saying. It's what you're eating. Oftentimes even more than how much you're eating, although a lot of people can overeat. I mean, I've been guilty of it myself. When I was in college, I was a shop putter.

My coach was like, you need to gain 75 pounds. 75 pounds? I gained weight. I ate everything in sight, massive quantities. So yes, overeating will make you gain weight. However, when I wanted to lose weight, I just looked at it. I went back to a normal quantity of food. and I balanced my macros, weight came down, I retained a significant amount of muscle mass, I've seen people go through the GLP-1 diets. And if you quit eating as a whole because you're not hungry anymore, of course you're going to lose weight and a lot of it's going to be muscle mass.

But if the person is diligent about making sure that they're getting a reasonable amount of calories in and not avoiding protein, which is harder to digest because GLP ones will slow your digestion down some. So you're feeling full. So it's harder to eat them. But if you're diligent about it, you can maintain quite a bit of muscle and lose that extra weight. You know, do I want to tell everyone to get on a GPL one to lose weight? No, I don't. But for some people, it's effective. Yeah, well, where I look at it is this.

We have, what, 93% of the population now who's metabolically unhealthy. So, you know, insulin resistance. We have 40% with fatty liver, over 40% now with obesity, probably the same group. And you look at these GLP-1s, and you're going to have a GLP-1 deficiency and I think probably resistance when you have fatty liver, when you're insulin resistant, when you're obese. So what happens to that person who's insulin resistant, super inflamed, they're doing like the average of like 3,000 steps a day because everything hurts and they can't, they're hungry all the time because they're insulin resistant and because they're hunger hormones aren't working well because they're GLP-1 resistant, and you say, you know what?

You just need to eat less and exercise more. We all want you to do that, but the reality is you need a little life raft first. Just a little help to get the edge off. I don't think the dose they're doing is the right dose. Just start them on protein, making sure they're getting their steps in, add in a little light dose of that, start pulling them out of the hole while they're then able to move more, add in resistance training, make sure their sleep is dialed, and then hopefully you can get them to a point where you just taper it off.

But there's so much research now on GLP-1s. I started looking at them as I heard Bill Seeds talk at an event, and I'm like, wow, this is neuroregenerative. And you know, I have a son with a brain injury. I put him on it because he'd had a second brain injury. I don't think he'd be here today without it. And that's why these things are now, it's coming out, cardio regenerative, neuro regenerative, good for your bones, good for autoimmune disease. So I think we have to take a second look at these things and really look at the problem with the diet side of it is a poorly designed diet.

They're being used wrong in any diet. Any diet you go on where you're going to restrict calories and not optimize protein is going to create a problem and not do resistance training. I don't think you should be allowed to do that. No caloric restriction unless you're going to optimize protein and do resistance training. In my perfect world. In your perfect world, yeah. So that's the comprehensive approach, looking at the big picture, understanding that the body is not just a switch where, okay, I can just stop eating as much but continue eating junk and drinking and all these other problematic pieces of the puzzle.

I just, as I've learned more and more about peptides or even medication, because I work with a community of people that are very metabolically dysregulated, nervous system dysregulated, and it's interesting because so many of them have come to me in a state where they just distrust all things medicine. The last couple years have not helped that. No. And they're so burnt out on honestly everything. They just want to do things naturally. They'd love to eat their way out of it, but they've done every diet.

They've done every trick of the trade and they're just not seeing success. And I'm going, whether it's obese people that can't move, can't walk like you're talking about, what if you really step back and go, is it more dangerous to be 400 pounds not moving and flamed or whatever we're going to find out? Because I don't think we know it all in GOP1 now. No, clearly not. or whatever maybe that's doing to the body in a short-term intelligent process where it gets you out of that state so now you can take back control of your own health.

And I do the same thing with clients. I'll refer them to a medical provider when they're in fight or flight and their histamine response is massive. Maybe an allergy medication can help there. We have all these tools at our disposal in our society and it's not that one set of tools is good and one set of tools is bad. It's just look at the big picture. How do we use all of the tools to be the most effective for the person where they're at. And that's helped me to be successful in my day-to-day practice and help people that are stuck move forward.

And I know that's a topic that you get into. You get into the topic of why aren't detoxes working? Like why is this big craze of detox? Why isn't this working for your community of people? And you've got some things to say on it, right? On detoxes? Yeah. You know I think that the biggest challenge is like we have to think of a cleanse and a detox like it's for me if you want to detoxify this is something that should be done with someone like you they should be doing testing it needs to be very targeted like you're messing around with stuff you don't just do something like a juice cleanse where you free up these toxins in your body, but now you don't have the amino acids to go conjugate it and get it out.

And now you just made yourself worse. Just like you don't just put someone on a fat loss program if they don't detoxify well. I think there's two different things. There's this idea of a cleanse and I think of a cleanse as almost more of an emotional mindset thing where we're going to go through and we're going to take some time to focus on you. We're going to put some good habits in place like maybe getting the snacking kicked out, stopping eating two to three hours before bed, you know waiting an hour or two when you wake up in the morning getting more water and just those good habits that yes will support detoxification but they're not truly what I think of when I think of detox.

Like to me, detox is let's go after, do we have mold? Do we have parasites? Do we have heavy metals? Like what is going on? And that should be with the medical provider. I love it. You know, one thing you mentioned is losing weight, making sure your body is fed.

Detox, Toxins, and Healing Before Weight Loss 23:00

And then when you get into this detox realm, you see people do a GLP one that when I run their urine, they're full of stuff. And I actually have a personal story. I was a college shop putter. I was 250 pounds. And it was time to lose weight. Like I'm done being big. I need to lose weight. I had been living in a moldy basement. I didn't know that that was a problem at the time. Had no idea. I had Lyme disease in my body. Didn't know it. Had no clue. And I dropped 60 pounds in a two and a half month period of time because I was motivated and I was going to work my way out of this.

What I didn't realize then and probably not for years as I was going through my training through chiropractic school and I just unleashed all the fat soluble toxins in my fat into my body. I ended up with erectile dysfunction, brain fog, body pain. And every other problem that would come alongside that, because I just was losing weight. And at the time, there was no GLP-1s, and I didn't know better. But it doesn't matter. You freed up fat. People never talk about this in weight loss, that when you free up fat, you're freeing up toxins.

No one talks about it. And you're, you're freeing up hormones too. So as all of these, all this junk comes out of you, I mean, I've, I personally went through that journey, but I've talked to clients who they're like, I have weight loss resistance. I can't lose weight. I'm stuck. And they keep, they keep running into the personal trainer, the, the diet coach, the, the, whoever they're working with, they lose 20 pounds and they rebound and gain an extra 10 back. And instead of doing what you're talking about, doing lifestyle, like making exercise a lifestyle, making quality food a lifestyle, and doing it probably at a pace that's more manageable, and then working with somebody that can look at the bigger pieces, they just keep rebounding.

I'm like, you know what? We're not gonna lose weight right now. You've got ochratoxinase, zirelinone, you've got mycophenic acid coming out of your body. You're not going to lose weight right now. We've got to focus on some other pieces first. Then we can come back in. I had a great mentor early on. This was like 20 years ago. And she taught me that you do not lose weight to get healthy. You have to get healthy to lose weight. It is not a popular one because people come in and they've seen all the diets and they want to lose this weight quick.

That's not popular. However, when you think about it, what you're going to go through is heal your metabolism and start to live like a healthy lean person. who moves throughout the day, who does some resistance training, who makes sure they get their sleep, even if they're in Las Vegas. They do all the things. You will become one over time, right? But you have to heal your metabolism. That's why I go back to these GLP-1s, because I go, if they're that metabolically damaged, and I could reduce their inflammation, drop their insulin, make their insulin work the way it should instead of being up all the time, and help them get a little bit out of that, that could be helpful.

But if they're super toxic, they have to be able to start detoxifying well before they touch that, or they're just going to feel like crap. I love it. Get healthy first. Yeah. Isn't that a great one? And again, I remember when she said, I go, that's not popular. How are we going to sell that? You might not be able to sell it to the mass population, but to the people that have the weight loss resistance, the people that have been through the wringer that keep running into the wall. But it's everybody.

Who isn't like that? Who isn't? Early on when I was on Dr. Phil and he had the chapter in his book, Weight Loss Resistance, I took that and I taught courses all around the country on weight loss resistance. And what I found was that my community didn't understand it at the time. This was 20 years ago. But they understood weight regain. And you look at the recidivism rate in dieting, what is it? Like 90% of people gain the weight back. You know, everyone who's done this already knows the end point if they don't do it correctly what's going to happen again.

You have to go back and repair and heal the damage. So even though at the time I was like this is such a not popular thing, it's really the only way. You have to heal your metabolism. And then it becomes a non-issue. I'm curious, there's a lot of tech out there, whether it be or ringing a loop, whether it be tracking your blood sugar through a constant glucose monitor. We're talking about metabolism. Is there any devices or tracking or testing that you really like? So I love DEXA scans. I love DEXA scans.

Because I think what we have to look at is we really have to know how much skeletal muscle mass we have. Early on, what I was doing was I was doing skin folds and a bio impedance machine and a tape measure trying to guesstimate visceral adipose tissue. Because it's not just your body fat, it's where that body fat is. It's entirely different to have your body fat on your hips and thighs versus your body fat around your internal organs. And at some point, we'll be able to really see intramuscular fat too.

Then it'll be game on, right? But I was trying to see visceral adipose tissue and kind of make a guesstimate of what a norm would be for fat-free mass to then extrapolate skeletal muscle, right? So I think what I like is a DEXA scan for a baseline to look at skeletal muscle, appendicular lean mass index percentage, try to be at the top, be an overachiever. look at your bone mineral density, but that's a lagging indicator. You look at blood sugar and blood sugar monitoring, look at your fasting insulin.

If your fasting insulin's good, I'm not worried about that. I'm not gonna worry about a blood sugar spike because you ate a kiwi. Because your insulin's too, we know you're good, right? A monitoring with a bioimpedance machine at home every day that reports to your phone so you can take the average over the week and not be the person who freaks out every day because they went up a pound or down a pound. You take it once a week to look at your total body water as a predictor of your fat-free mass to ensure that if you are losing weight, that your body water's maintaining or going up as you're losing weight.

So that shows that you're losing fat. You're putting that together with a tape measure once a week, waist to hip and waist to height, so that you can make sure that if you are losing weight, you are losing your waist. Because if you're losing weight, not losing your waist, you know, potato and stilts make yourself worse, not better. And then I do love the aura ring. And what I really love it for is HRV. So just to kind of give you an indicator of, am I overtraining? I find most people are not overtraining.

There's so much buzz out there of like, I don't want to do that. That training, I'll raise my cortisol. I'm like, if you didn't raise your cortisol, you'd be dead. We have to be able to raise cortisol and insulin. Where do we get scared of these hormones? But I think it is a good indicator to see how stress tolerant you are if you're in this sympathetic overdrive. So I like that a lot. And I also love hand grip dynamometers. Those are fun toys. I had one at my clinic and everybody was just wanting to squeeze it, right?

I did a talk a month ago at this place called Eudaemonia and I talked about hand grip dynamometers and we happened to have one in our booth and I'm like, it was like a mob scene to do this. But when you look at the research, low grip strength, the lowest 25% has the highest all-cause mortality. So it is a Amazing proxy and this doesn't mean because I and then people go I got those hand grip trainers I'm like that is not what not what it is. It's supposed to be a proxy for overall strength So if your grip strength is poor, that doesn't mean squeeze a tennis ball That means like do some pull-ups do some farmers carries, right?

Do the things that can improve your overall strength, but that's a great one and another one I think that we should be doing this a test is a vo2 max Mm-hmm So I know these are off the typical, but boy, the VO2 max of all of them is the most predictive of all-cause mortality. And yet, no one gets it done. You know, I've spent too many years in college, and our lab had all of these things. And yeah, I was getting obsessed with just tracking everything, VO2 max, and you got the apparatus on. You did the Wingate test, and you did lactate, and you'd say, yep, Oh yeah, I mean, we did a anabolic threshold test where you'd sprint on a bike and then drop way down there and it'd stop.

And I'm like, it was just so fun seeing where you rate. Wouldn't it be amazing if your yearly physical had a dynamometer or a VO2 or a VO2 might be a little harder. Just a push-up test. Well, you can do an extrapolated VO2 max with 12 minutes on a treadmill. You could do a three minute step test. So you can do a metronome three-minute step test that will predict a VO2 max. You can walk a mile and predict a VO2 max. So there's enough other prediction ways to do it. And then you could just, I mean, a hand grip dynamometer is 30 bucks, right?

And then you can do pushups. Like imagine if we did pushups, a balance test, you know, just some of the things that are the most predictive. And the other cool thing about them is you can actually do something about them. Which gives, well, I mean, giving these markers, right, it also gives motivation. You said early on in our conversation today, there's a huge mindset aspect to this. And there's a little bit of a dopamine response when you go in and you start everything, you do three push-ups or your grip test is 40 pounds and when

Tracking Health with DEXA, Wearables, and Fitness Tests 33:00

you go in, you know you're gonna do better because you're working at it. It's exciting. I know with the clients that I'm working with, we're not doing those sorts of things. We're doing a lot of lab testing, but they're excited to get more tests. Yeah, and see the difference, see the change, which is when you just do a weight loss diet You did everything perfect. You were so good. And then you get on the scale, and the scale went up that day. Right? I mean, we've all seen it. You're like, this is not motivating whatsoever.

That's why we say just have it report to your Bluetooth and look at it once a week. But it's super fun about strength training because when someone's new to resistance training, their strength's going to go up so quickly because of their central nervous system communicating with their muscles. Like, it's just incredible. And it's so motivating. It's like, wow, I was doing overhead presses with five-pound dumbbells and now I can do 15-pound dumbbells? And that can happen in a month. Those wins, those tracking, the wearables, the aura ring, just seeing everything get better as long as it's getting better.

But here's the thing, if it's not getting better, Wouldn't you want that information early on to go? Hey, you know so-and-so told me I should be on this keto diet But this is not working for me It's like wouldn't you want to know that you need to make some tweaks or maybe you're doing a diet where you're? Intolerant to dairy and you're hammering it, you know, you just get the information you can make the adaptations That's why I like to say these these tools are biometric tools. It's not a mean friend You know, there's all this stuff about getting on scales and like don't weigh me.

It triggers me I go you're looking at this wrong We are looking at what your weight's made up of and what do we need to shift in order to achieve what we're trying to achieve. It's not some self-worth issue. Yeah, I tell you what, I got my aura ring a couple years ago and I am guilty of not wanting to go to bed very early too much. And it did not like me. It let me know. It's like, your sleep is terrible because you don't spend enough time in bed. I'm like, but I feel fine. And then I was like, I'll do the experiment.

I'll go to bed a little earlier. I'll sleep a little bit longer. And sure enough, HRV is just like, It was already pretty good because I was doing a lot of good things. But it taught me more, and I was just like, all right, fine. I know, because it will tell you. Like, literally, I wake up one morning, and it goes, looks like you ate late last night. I'm like, what are you, like, in my house? Like, how did you know? And I think a CGM can be a useful thing. I just think that we may be using them in situations where it's kind of ridiculous.

Like, if someone's fasting insulin's 12, that's where a place where I'd love to put this in. Like, let's now use a CGM. and see what we can do to improve all of this. But if someone's got a fasting insulin of two and their triglycerides are great and their HDL is great, I think it's kind of moot. As doing the detox, you know, that's more the realm. I've started using them as a different kind of tool for CGM. It's like, yeah, I want to track your blood sugar because it's necessary to understand that it's within a good range.

However, if your blood sugar spikes for no apparent reasons, What is that trigger happening? It's a stress trigger. What is the stress? And it's been able to help me identify in people stressors in their life, whether that's walking into grandma's house that you go to every Sunday and all of a sudden it's spiking. Well, is it stressful at dinner? No. Grandma's house have mold? Maybe. That's a great one. That's super smart. I first started to learn about cortisol because I saw blood sugars elevated with a normal diet, normal insulin.

And I was like, what is going on here? Like, what is going on here? What do we have to dig into? And again, is it stress? What kind of stress? Where's the stress coming from? That's a really smart use of it. Yeah, so we started using that to just be like a telltale sign of you're doing everything right. And I believe you because you're like the people I'm working with are, they are super diligent and motivated because they're feeling really badly. It's like, what am I missing? What is going on here?

And then we see these little clues and CGMs have helped with that. Biometric tractors help with that because sometimes it's not obvious. Sometimes Sometimes they're eating a beautiful diet that you're just like, it's perfect. Except for that one person, chicken was a problem. And you're like, why is chicken a problem? I don't know why chicken is a problem. Stop eating chicken for a minute. Oh, blood sugar regulated. Okay, well, we'll cut that out for the moment. I don't love cutting food out all the time.

That should seemingly be healthy. Then we cut it out. We come back around and we help the body get the inflammation out, which by the way, the weight starts coming down. And then oftentimes you can have chicken again because your body was just in a flared state. Maybe you ate chicken when you had a stressful conversation. Your body now identifies chicken as a problem. This is so funny because when I wrote The Virgin Diet, it was pull these foods out for three weeks, then go back one by one, check in, see which ones work for you and which ones don't.

And I see people like seven years later and they go, I'm on your program. And I go, when did you start? Seven years ago. I go, but it's a three week program. It's not a, they go, I felt so good. I didn't want to try those things again. I go, but eggs are great. Like it doesn't mean you could never have these things again. It's like, just check in. Now on the one hand, when you pulled all those foods out, you couldn't eat ultra processed foods very easily. So that was a benefit. Yes. Yes. And honestly, the virgin diet as talking to you earlier, it is a, It was a game changer in the industry.

And mind you, I was coming into the knowledge base at the time that that diet came out. That's the book my mother handed me saying, I think this might help me to help change her life. And I read through it, and I was like, oh, this is kind of interesting. Gluten, dairy. All I did was take an elimination diet that I'd been looking, because I was teaching that overcoming weight loss resistance course, we were using a food sensitivity test, and all the doctors were using it. So I saw so many food sensitivity test results.

And what I saw was the traditional elimination diet that's been used for decades didn't match up to what I saw in the food sensitivity test. I go, well, this is silly. Why are we eliminating strawberries and orange and citrus? When I've looked at hundreds of these tests now, and it is rare to ever see it. It's always dairy and eggs and then corn, soy, peanuts. And gluten, of course, is a different way to test. And so the first time I did it with people, I was pulling out six foods. But what I discovered was if you pull out those six foods and you don't pull out sugar and artificial sweeteners, guess what they eat?

I thought it was obvious because I don't have a sweet tooth. I was like, what are you eating? Why are you eating all this sugar? So and then you look at it and go, well, gluten can make your gut permeable and fructose can make your gut permeable. And of course, artificial sweeteners are just horrible, which I know there's all sorts of fighting back and forth now that artificial sweeteners are great. I'm like, oh, come on. Come on. So I don't even think we have to have that discussion. But let's just pull this out because they're damaging the gut, which is creating the problem, which is making people react to these foods.

But it just felt so obvious to me at the time and simple. And actually, one of the critiques of the book was like, this is too simple. I'm like, isn't that a good thing? I'm confused. You know, just to bring it all full circle, it's like you started off with talking about a mindset on health, going into being strong, living powerfully, or I'm going to plug my sign on my wall because my staff was so nice.

Mindset, Movement, and Lifelong Strength 41:00

You got to be strong enough to live your life. But then you also have to eat foods that aren't triggering and just simply Just simply live a life that is healthy and is movement-oriented. It's not cutting away at your life because when we're young, we're all running around, we're all squatting, we're jumping, we're climbing. Who says getting older, you have to stop that? Well, you go to other countries and they're, you know, I lived in Japan for a while. They'll sit and wait for a bus in a full squat.

Everyone's walking. carrying all their stuff. Just in our country, things are a little bit weird. And I think about your sign, you have to be strong enough to live the life of your dreams. You know, not to get by, but to have this amazing life. And so I think of Peter Attia and his centenarian decathlon of like, if you start to go, what do I want to be able to do in my 70s, my 80s, my 90s? You must be training for that now. It's not going to get easier. You have to get stronger. No one has goals of falling into their couch and never moving when they're 60 and 70 or getting pulled off the toilet.

That's the big one. I always go. So you don't want to do squats. However, you do one every day, multiple times a day. So you might want to be doing those so that you never have to call for your husband or wife to help you off the toilet. That's like that's that's a that's a basic life goal. That's a very basic one. And I'm going to get in trouble for throwing my mom into the bus. But every single year she wants to garden. But she does nothing all winter. And then she's miserable the week of gardening, so sore, so fatigued, so tired.

You could just exercise in the winter a couple of days a week. Well, now she's got a trainer. And she does have a trainer. And he is a chunky, happy, smiling, squeaking. Little trainer that never stops pointing at just chasing him around and it's it Those would be great videos to have by the way him training. You got to put those up like he is something else and He's now I don't know where he even learns. I don't even do that many deadlifts at home He he was tired of the ones and he made me get the fives out He just points at him and I grab him put on the ground put the other one to ground he walks over to me grabs him and he starts doing deadlifts like just good form RDL in front of me.

And I'm just like, where'd you learn that? One, because he's watching YouTube videos on the side. And I don't even give him technology very often, so he must be sneaking it. And he just starts doing deadlifts. I'm like, grandma, looks like you got some new workouts to be doing. This is great. Get him a medicine ball. My kids growing up, because I had a gym, they thought the balls weighed 5 to 10 to 20 pounds, because we got all these medicine balls. I do have them and they're the big puffy ones and he rolls them around.

And I'm like, okay, so you're doing like the stone rolls from the strongman competition. It's just so fun to watch. And he's obsessed with the single handle for an adult, like one handle and just pulling on the cable. And right now it's 10 pounds and he's just tugging and pulling and tugging. Get him some battle rubs too. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah. This is going to be so much fun. And I just take him down there, let him do what he wants, and he's done. He walks away at his age now, of course.

But I just can't wait. One of my friends sent me a shirt in the mail when he was born. It said, Daddy's little weight lifting buddy. He's out growing it now. He's outgrown it now. It's just like it is my absolute dream come true. Grandma's personal trainer. That's coming. That will be the perfect Christmas thing. I'll put on there sponsored by JJ Verge. Well, this has been amazing and so much fun, and just thank you. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into Dr. Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.

Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.DrTalks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on doctors on the issues that matter to you most.