JJ Virgin on Boundaries, Midlife Health, and the Power of Putting Yourself First

Introduction and JJ Virginu2019s background 0:00

What does it really mean to be a powerful woman, especially when your body, your health, and your identity are constantly evolving? Welcome back to Everyday Ancestral, the podcast where we explore how ancient wisdom meets modern living through food, health and human connection. I'm your host, James Berry. Today's guest, JJ Virgin. joins us to share hard-earned wisdom from training celebrities, navigating personal tragedy, and busting health myths that keep women stuck. We talk midlife must-do's, nutrition fads versus ancestral truths, And why listening to your body might be the most radical thing you can do.

Please enjoy JJ Virgin. I know this is a male-dominated industry. particularly trainers, every person I worked for always had a male trainer. They had female nutritionists and a man trainer, but here you were a female, a very strong female in a, very male dominated industry. Like what was that like? I never noticed. You know what's so funny is the reality is when I started personal training, there weren't personal trainers. There were coaches. Right? And it was me, as far as I know, like Mark Sisson, Body by Jake, and Tony Horton.

What was crazy back then is I would take my clients on field trips down to Gold's Gym and they didn't have trainers. Anyone could come in, you know. And there were just a couple of us. Then all of a sudden it exploded and became a thing. So I love where it is, and honestly, I think females are actually better suited to be trainers than men. That's my opinion. Why is that? Here's the reality. Especially for men, we're better-suited. we can get away with stuff with those guys. They'll do stuff for us they wouldn't necessarily do for a male trainer.

I mean, it's the truth, right? It's reality. It totally is. You don't wanna look like a wimp in front of a gal, especially if I've just gone and picked up the weights that I'm gonna have them lift and handed it into them. That's such a good point. Now, but was there ever an issue of like, Here you were a young woman and you're trying to make money. Was there ever an issue of drawing boundaries or just? Oh, sure. I am excellent at drawing boundary. Of course. However, I think it's also how you set things up.

I never ever, you know, I did not wear overtly sexual clothing. I didn't set up anything to be flirty. Like none of that ever happened. And the reality is in all the years of training I'm thinking of three times that I got hit on. Even those times it was very easy to shut it down quickly. Well, that's super impressive. Given that, particularly Hollywood, like so many women In general, like the whole Me Too movement was about how before that women were feeling like, oh, I have to do this to get ahead, right?

That was kind of this unspoken reality. So super impressive you had boundaries then. Well, who knows where I would be if I like didn't have boundaries. Okay, here's a crazy story I've never told before. You want to hear this one? Yes, I love it. This is crazy. I literally have never ever told this story. So I was going into a little coffee shop in Brentwood, California on a, like, Saturday morning, Sunday morning getting an Americano and this man came out afterwards and asked me if I as a model, those lame things you get asked all the time when you're six feet tall.

And I said, no. And he goes, well, would you like to meet because I've got a leather, Italian leather line and we're booking new models and it pays X amount. I go, maybe, you know? And it goes meet me up at the, I forget where it was like Hotel Bel Air, we'll talk about it. Am like, okay.

Boundaries and navigating a male-dominated industry 4:00

So I got up there, so here's the wildest thing. Now I already am thinking this is, it's absolutely BS but let's hear him out, I'm safe, I am in a public place, it'll be fine. So I sit down and the guy's got three envelopes. And the first envelope, the card, he said, open the cards up. The first card was, you have to kiss a bunch of frogs to find your handsome prince. I don't remember what the second card is, and I look at this dude and he goes, so how much, now remember, I'm an undergrad at UCLA at the time, I am working five jobs.

I have a scholarship to UCLA, but I also work in all these jobs, running an aerobic studio, personal training, all this stuff, right? Very busy. And I make good money for me in the 80s, still. He goes, well, how much would you need? Like what would be your dream amount of money to make each month? And here's what's funny, I was like, wow, $15,000. I thought this was an enormous sum, right? and he goes open the last envelope and the envelope was really thick. And the last envelope was hundreds. It was just hundreds and hundreds, and he's like, that's $15,000. I don't know if it was, because I didn't count it.

And he proceeded to tell me that he would set me up in a condo, he'd get me a Jaguar, I'd have like a, you know, black American Express card, blah blah, like I'm looking at him. Like, do you it's so funny? I say this to him, You probably picked the one gal in LA who's going to turn this one down. They're all around you. Why would you have picked me? There is some crazy stories from that kind of stuff. I knew a woman where she, a famous writer was doing that, but not sexual at all. But they were paying for all these bills just to support her and trying to make her.

And I mean, there was just some. Crazy stuff that went down. So I'm blown away that you navigated that just with these strong boundaries at such a young age. It's just so rare. I don't have great boundaries in all areas, I will say, but I always had a boundary there because here's my thought process. The minute you cross that boundary, you're done. You just destroyed the probably most precious thing out there. You destroyed your chance of ever having a real relationship. It just didn't work for me.

Now, other people may be able to do that and jump on into other things and be fine, but I knew for, I wouldn't. I couldn't- Now you just mentioned you do struggle with some boundaries. Where do you struggle there? Don't we all struggle some with boundaries? Yeah, but i'm so curious because you seem I mean I think to the person who meets you they're like gosh jay's got it together. She's Physically strong. she's a strong person. He's Go get her go give her, you know, no one has it. Together. No one.

Has it? Together? Everyone has their stuff. Um, so what do you start out? So like what you're looking at me is that i am the most disciplined mother on the planet. That is where I'm like, and also a very disciplined dog owner. Nope, those two totally suck at, you know? You're ruled by your dog. And it's funny, I keep thinking about, if Tim and I raised kids together, it would have been kind of pathetic because both of us, the dog will go poop on carpet. My son, Bryce, is absolutely fantastic about punishing her and getting her to stop doing that.

We're both like oh, It's okay. Okay. That's super fun. Um, going back to the training though, so you've, you're trained some of the most, You know, high performance celebrities out there. What have you learned though about discipline mindset and health that most everyday women are overlooking? So what's interesting when you train celebrities is they have to do this for their career. I trained a lot of news anchors, and then celebrities, I'd get them ready for different films. And when it's your career, you take it like it a job.

Think if we all approached our health as if it was our number one job, because it should be, right? I mean, how different would things be? And I'll tell you the other interesting group that I trained. And, you know, I started doing training and nutrition because one without the others didn't really work. So that meant more school. But what I really saw was the men. I had pretty much a 50-50 split of men and women clients. The men were really easy. You told the man what to do. The men got their support team around them to create all the stuff so that their schedule was set up correctly for them for their training.

If there was supposed to be a massage therapist, they were coming over, their food was correct. Everything was setup for then and they just showed up to do the work. The women, not the case. They put themselves last, they put everything else in front of that, They didn't prioritize this, you know. I was like, oh my gosh, come on. So just that little thing that you look at and you go, women you need to stop putting yourself at the last last on the list. Put yourself on top of the lists. That whole oxygen mask on you first is true.

No one listens to it. But you got to do it. And the reality is, if you want to be a great mom role model, guess what? They're watching you. So if they're watchin you not take care of yourself, they are not going to take of themselves. It's such a good point. I have to wonder if that is why we're seeing that kind of boomerang effect right now because it feels like So many of the topics right now are about not only women empowerment, but women's health. Like we're seeing a lot about menopause. I see it all over social media now and I never used to see.

Well, it might be what you're following.

Training celebrities and womenu2019s self-prioritization 10:00

So it's probably my age, yeah, that's true. That's funny. Now, here's what's interesting. Women can put themselves second or third or fourth or probably 10th, if they're even on the list, for years and years, and, years until they start to get into perimenopause. And they can even blow it off for a while into period menopaus until it takes them down. and that what you're finally seeing is we have a big margin for error until we get to there. And the reality is the more you drive yourself, the harder you are on yourself the faster you're gonna get into perimenopause.

Like you can trigger that thing early if you not careful. I think the reason you seeing so much of it is it's just something that makes you stop and pause and go, all right, I'm gonna have to address this because I can't handle it. Whether it the emotional side of, you know, physical changes, The brain fog. I mean, there's so many things that happened during this time and some people get all of them. Some people got one of him, but it's pretty much impossible to ignore. challenging thing for people to to improve or make changes to like what they eat because we're so stuck in our ways and what I find is that most people don't make Changes unless they're sick or someone they love gets sick, or dies So what what would be I don' know three things that you wish every woman would start doing now before their symptoms That are screaming at them to make change You know Honestly, I think we got to reframe the question.

I had a great nutrition mentor early on who said, add before you take away. One of the biggest mistakes we think in nutrition is taking away before we're adding. Then I love Tim Ferriss's question of what if it were easy? What if we looked at things that we could start to put into our daily life? what If we added before, we started taking it away? With women, the most important thing with women is to ditch the traditional scale because it has destroyed us. It has totally ruined our whole mental health, metabolic health and metabolism, because it's made us track the wrong metric for success.

If I want to lose a lot of weight, what I need to do is stop all resistance training. I just need kind of run around as much as possible and starve myself. And I will drop muscle like nobody's business, and I'll be a soft, flabby, unhealthy, sarcopenic, frail human. And that's what the scale would tell you to do. So the first thing we need to in terms of women is really track what matters. And the reality is you can't do that with the traditional scale. You have to get a biomedian scale, I'm checking out right now because apparently now you even do it with your phone and some measurements.

But what we're really trying to to is how much of your body is fat free mass? That's everything but fat. And to focus actually on proving that before you even start to worry about losing fat. We were taught the exact opposite in grad school. In grad, school I was literally taught, do not have someone lift weights until they lose the weight. Can you imagine that? Do not someone have lift weight until the lose weight? No one would ever lift the weights. Well, first of all, and by the way, you saw it happen on The Biggest Loser.

If you focus on losing lots of weight, You're going to create metabolic adaptation. It's going happen where you start to burn less calories than you should at the weight that you are. So you've got to focus first on building that muscle that will improve your insulin sensitivity. that will give carbohydrates a place to land. It's a sugar sponge that we'll start to support a better metabolism. it's actually gonna help you lose fat, especially if you then do the second thing, which is eat to the support the muscles.

So eat protein first, eat carbohydrates that are rich in fibers and whole. You know, if eat support your muscles, a whole lot of shift happens, not the other. Whole lot shift happen without you even trying, right? It feels like though that there is a lot What's happening is that there's a lot of confusion. There's almost too much information out there now and that people don't know where to start. For the person that is feeling kind of stuck, is there just kind even one thing that you would recommend they do just to kind start shifting things?

Start shifting, whether it's mindset or their body or anything of that sort, to just start down this path. Yeah, I think it always has to start with your mindset. I mean, that's the single most important thing. You know, doing a talk and someone in the audience said, how do we avoid, you know the rebound weight gain? If you look at the average diet out there, 95% recidivism rate and within five years, How do avoid that? And I said the way you avoid it is to find fitter friends. Actually put that out online and got attacked.

you're telling me to dump my friends, like I didn't say that. What I said is, get around some people who will challenge you, who live a fitness lifestyle. Because if you're hanging out with me, we're not staying out till one in the morning, I go to bed at nine or 10, and get up early. I'm gonna work out, We're gonna eat healthy. It's just not gonna, it's not a thing. So it not even an issue, you wouldn't have an issues being with because you just be living healthy, And what the research shows is that you, just like that Jim Rohn quote of you are the average income of the five people you hang out with, you're actually the body composition of five of people that hangout with.

And even if they're across the country and a best friend, we tend to be like those people we spend the most time with It's, I absolutely believe in that, what you're saying. That's been my experience as well. I'm curious though, you are known for embracing cutting edge science, but what do you think we've lost from ancestral wisdom that's essential to reclaim, especially for women? I love all the ancestral stuff, I like the bro stuff and I liked the lab stuff. And I think we all need to get along.

I'm really irritated by what I've seen online where the, you know, lab scientists are attacking the health influencers. We need everybody. But you need be careful if you're like just spouting off, like, do some research. However, we need have the labs science, then we to take that into the real world and try it. Sometimes the Bro Science, the stuff I saw happening at Gold's Gym for decades, lends itself to then get studied. So everyone I think needs to get along. And if you look back, one of the first things that happened in my nutrition career, that's just wild when I thinking about how fortuitous this was, is I ended up in a small room.

There were maybe 12 of us with Dr. Lauren Cordain. For anyone that doesn't know, Paleo Diet father, basically, right? Yeah. This was way before he wrote the book. I was working with Designs for Health, and they paid him to do a lecture on Paleolithic nutrition because they based their whole company on paleo principles.

Midlife health, menopause, and body composition 17:00

And as I listen to this, I'm like, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. And I think the challenge we have nowadays is we two things that we are faced with that are so far beyond outside of ancestral nutrition, that being circadian rhythm disruption, I mean like lights and tech, all the stuff that like, if you look at what's single most important thing, it's like get in touch with nature and light and grounding, you know, so we've totally screwed that thing up. I mean, some people live in a place where they never get their feet on the dirt.

Yeah. And I try to go out every day and get my feet in the dirty and go walk. We were just out in Utah, like walking through all of the great forests, hiking, how do you get out into nature more? I actually just saw a study, James, where were looking at mental health and exercise and they They saw an increase in mental health just by having people walk and look at nature videos. I'm like, why don't we just put them outside? Like, let's just get them out. So that's one piece. And then of course, the crazy toxins that we are getting hit with that are so far from anything our body was ever built to handle.

Those two things have to be overcome. And then we can kind of go back and go, all right, what would these principles have been? And there's so many simple things that you can take from that of just eating as close to nature as possible, of feast and famine. You look at it and you go very unlikely we would have had regular meals every single day and all that stuff. Which is why when people go you could only eat this much protein. I'm like, I pretty sure when they killed an animal they ate as much as they could get in them.

and that their body knew what to do with it. Recent protein studies showed exactly that. How do we really get the toxin piece of things and the circadian rhythm piece things fixed? Because I think those along with just the isolation of our modern world are our three biggest threats. How are you fixing them in your own life? Are you being consistent about waking up at a certain time, getting that early morning light? How you doing it? We change time zones a lot, which is great. And what I found is that creatine saves me on time zone shifting, but I use lights as well.

Caffeine? Creatine, I'm playing around with some exogenous ketones right now with kinetics, and then light is what I use. So I am a big person and it's interesting because my husband is kind of a vampire, kind a mole. He does not like bright light. In the morning I want to go outside, want the windows open, see light, it is like let's go. And I just have made a point I've really learned how to time zone adjust well and use the light as my friend and creatine so and melatonin so I use all of those things and the toxin side of things I am a huge sauna fan, and I just was hearing something Dr.

Rhonda Patrick was reporting on about hot baths, too, being just or maybe more efficacious. The study didn't compare apples to oranges, so it was a hard study to really pay attention to. But when I'm home, I sauna every single day. And when on the road, if I can get a bathtub, because hotels now seem to have gotten rid of their bathtubs, but when can I get one, then I do that so that I just continue detoxifying that way, too. I think that we have to think about every day, what are the things we can do to help our body eliminate toxins?

Because no matter what kind of lifestyle you're created, obviously you don't want to do silly things like drink out of plastic bottles. But still, we're going to get toxins everywhere. I want to talk about Creatine, but before we do, because we're kind of bringing up the whole science piece. How are you navigating the science? Because we've both been in this health field for long enough to see that it's very co-opted at times, right? It's manipulated to whoever's paying for its desired outcome. So how are YOU navigating that?

Well, because we all have biases, right? I mean, everybody does. You know, the protein one is the craziest one. Like the Protein Wars are wars between, you know if you eat too much, it's gonna hurt your longevity. If you don't eat enough, that's going to hurt you longevity and then if eat plant, is gonna be better. But if, eat animal, its better, It's like, oh my gosh. I think that we've got to go to a couple different things. We've always got go back to, you know, biochemistry, physiology, biology.

Like, you gotta go back to the science. I know they all want the double-blind, placebo-controlled, random, blah, but those are really hard to do in certain cases. It's really to hard do placebo controlled, randomized, double blinded exercise studies. How would you possibly do one? They know what they're doing. You know? I mean, it's like, there's some things you can do, But it is pretty darn hard. So, I think we have to look at all these things and try to use our rational minds, the science that we already know in terms of our physiology and biology and biochemistry, and then, you know, look at these studies and, then look in the real world.

I remember in school, we would be taught stuff in grad school and I go, yeah, that's fine, but I'm in real-world and that, it's not working. So you, know that might work in this controlled setting here, But in a free-living setting, this goes out the window. That's the other piece too. It's like, will it work? Yeah, it's almost following your own emotional intelligence around something. I remember back in the day, a girlfriend I had, her doctor actually told her it was more natural for her to be...

She wasn't needing the pill at the time, but she was told to take the pills because that would be more than natural to her than not taking the pillow. And I just thought that was... Yeah, exactly. Like our own emotional tells us like that makes zero sense. Yeah. And so I think you have to factor that in. I Think that's a really good point. But let's now go to creatine because because I would love you to first explain because that is a hot topic. It's something that just got called out on it. Really?

Yeah, well, everyone's talking about studying before the study came out, which is a faux pas no no, but it's like, it is out in another week. But I was like you know, like I knew I'd get attacked. I don't care anymore. Okay, will you start with like first of all, what is creatine for those that don' know and why is it such a hot topic right now? Creatine is a compound in your body that your buddy generally has about 120 to 140 grams of. It makes about a gram a day from arginine, methionine and glycine.

Mindset, community, and ancestral nutrition 24:00

And then ideally you're getting another gram day. If you are under any kind of stress, training hard, have any neuro issues, neurodegeneration, you wanna go up from there. The research, the big argument in the field on creatine, so creatines comes from meat. So in order to get that other gram a day would take about a pound of raw or rare meat or fish or two pounds of cooked. Now for a carnivore, no problem, they got it. But for lot of women, especially women who are trying to be more plant-based, right?

They're not getting it, They are not gonna get it especially when you look at the average protein intake for woman in the U.S. I think it's about 80 grams, but a lot that comes from plant. So they're getting what they need for creatine. This is especially problematic because women have less tissue stores than men because it stored in your muscle. So we don't have as much muscle. We don' have this much tissue store. It's like 20 to 30% less. And so what the current research, in fact, it's hot off the press.

A new menopause study just came out showing what it did for brain fog. What was most exciting about this menopus study and what I got my butt kicked for. Which I don't care. I knew I was going to, I actually knew the person who came after me would do it because he's a big bully online. Here's the argument. Creatine monohydrate is the most steady form of creatine, so that's one we should take. That is like saying rotary phones are the phone that we grew up with, that is one that should be used. It's just a nonsensical thing.

Don't we evolve and get better as we're learning things? It turns out that, you know, if you think of the math, we're supposed to take three to five grams of creatine monohydrate, and we do it based on weight. And now they're having people take 10 grams or 20 grams, depending on trying to push more into the brain, because your brain takes about 5% of your creatinine uptake. The rest is your body, And preferentially, it seems your will take more of it if it's needing it. So in order to get it to the bring you have to to harder.

So, you know, if you need five grams of creatine, why are they, or one gram of You need to take five because only about 15% of creatine monohydrate gets absorbed. Now the study I've been citing, but I can't show you the publication yet, But apparently it's two weeks away now, showed that 76% percent of people who took creatinine mono hydrate experienced some kind of bloaty GI issues. And you'll see this fighting back and forth. No, no one has that. Yes, a lot of have it. Here's what I just found from personal experience.

I learned about creatine. I'm like, this is the greatest thing ever. Every woman should be on this. Why did I ignore this for so many years? All the guys were on it when I was down at Gold's Gym. They all looked scary and so I wanted no part of it. As I am going through it, I go, boy, was my head in the sand. So creatine helps you create more ATP. So it's going to help you. Create more energy in your brain and your body. It's good for your skin. That's could fear bones. I mean, like all sorts of stuff.

Research coming out help showing that it could help with bone. but a lot of the menopausal symptoms helps you work out harder, helps your recover better. I start selling creatine monohydrate, and I get more blowback on that product than I've ever got. And I'd been 30 years in the supplement industry, mainly helping doctors put supplements in their practices. So if there's a complaint, I hear it, but I never gotten pushback like I have gotten from people, even some of my friends and friends in field were like, ''I'm not taking it.

'' I gained weight. , I don't feel good. Even my husband. So I'm like, okay. And I got some GI stuff when I was loading it, but I said, yeah, I'll work through it. You can't tell a woman to work her way through weight gain. No, they won't do it. So, and you know, you do hope that most of that is intramuscular, but in this situation, it's not. And that was the issue. I was at a conference talking about creatine and this formulator came up to me and goes, I have a better creatinine. And I was like, yeah, I've heard about the other creatines, it's marketing hype, blah, but show me what you got.

I want to be critically open-minded. Don't wanna sound like another one of these people parroting, this is the only one you can use. So I go to his manufacturing plant in the United States, in Nebraska, and we learn all about it. Tim and I test it, I'm now taking way higher doses than before, like with no GI issues, because I was cranking at my other one, but it was like, eh. So, and I looked at that and went, this is how I can solve this problem for women. And that's where Tim came up with the name Shiatine.

It's not like- Which is a great name. Yeah, it's a good name, It is not guys can't take the product, just like I need women to get to stop being afraid of it. I took creatine HCl, which is 85% absorbed, as opposed to 15% absorb. And I put it together with taurine and magnesium because when I was looking through the literature, I couldn't find a tauring magnesium creatine combo, but I found creatinine taurean and creatina magnesium and both of them had an exponential effect. They both helped in working out harder recovery, better recovery.

So I'm like, So these are two nutrients that people tend to be deficient in. And I created a formula that you could take 4X the foundational dose and be still right in range. So if someone wanted to load it for their brain, and then I started moving this, this product has exploded compared to anything I've ever done. You know, it just has, exploded because people feel it. They feel it in their brain, they feel in the body. I use it for jet lag shifting. It's really super duper exciting. And this research project that just came out where they looked at creatine HCl for brain fog.

They did three different, four groups. So it was a randomized placebo-controlled blinded study, the highest quality study that there is. And what they did was they took a group and they gave them 750 milligrams of creatine HCl, which equals about five grams of monohydrate. They gave one group 1,500. And then they give one a combined of HCL and ethyl ester. Then they one gave group nothing, placebo. And what they found was both with 715 and 1500, they were getting the brain effects that you usually only see at higher doses of monohydrate, like 10 grams and 20 grams, which are causing some of those GI issues.

So that is my creatine story. When I have this other study, I'm going to be blabbing it everywhere. I already responded to the bully and called him a bully because he is bully.

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What is your opinion on at what cost? Because clearly we're talking about things that are isolates. They're not always natural. But is you're opinion that if it works, it work and it doesn't matter or where's the balance for you? So here's the thing. You can't do a natural creatine product. It would cost a gazillion dollars. Would your best thing be in a perfect world? This is kind of how I set my hierarchy of things. Perfect world. Get everything possible you can from your food. Food first, always.

Can you get enough vitamin D, three and K2, not K1, but K two from their food? I doubt it. I've only seen one person that doesn't need to take D3, K 2. in years of looking at labs. One that can get to the levels they need to be in. They're out in the sun all the time and genetically they probably are, you know, blessed. I don't make vitamin D well. Magnesium, if you can't get enough, do an RBC magnesium. Great. And Omega-3s, I think that's one that if you really focus on fish and clean fish, great, but there's a lot of dirty fish out there.

And so that where I look at it and go, what are the things that we should be getting in nature? Like look back 500,000 years ago, we probably had great creatine levels in our body that are not getting now. If we can't get them, and I wouldn't bother with creatines for a carnivore, But I don't know many female carnivores. And I also don' believe that the carniva diet long term is, I think it's a great elimination diet and a grea healing diet. Then I thnk let's bring back in some polyphenols and fiber from plants.

I know that probably upsets all the carnavores who think plants are the scarys. You've been in the industry long enough as well to just know like, hey, these trends come and go. There's always someone trying to push an extreme for their brand, right? Because that's how you kind of stand out from the crowd is by picking something extreme or specific. Where have you found that Oh no, this is the truth. I mean, I guess you kinda just shared it, the real food, but is there something out there that you think people should almost unlearn because of all the chatter out right now?

Well, if we're talking food specifically, and I see diets as tools, it's really about choosing the right tool for the job, what is going on right know. Sometimes, quite often, a diet that's gonna heal you is not gonna sustain you for long haul. So everything needs to be designed based on you. I mean, we're in a really fun, interesting time where we can now have labs and we could look at body composition and you can look your lifestyle and your preferences. You could design a fabulous diet for me, rich in kimchi, and I'll never eat it.

Like fermented foods, unless we are talking about wine, don't like them. You know, wine and chocolate are my fermented foods that I like, maybe some Greek yogurt. So we've got to design diets that people will actually stick to for the long haul. I can tell you, because I've written a bunch of diet books and everyone wants you to take an absolute, this is the thing. There's never a thing, there might be a think right now in where you are in your life, for some people. But I put some clients on a carnivore diet because it was the perfect thing to get them to start to heal and get rid of their, you know binge behavior, cause it takes out, I mean it's, really hard to binge on steak.

You just get full, you know? So I got some with a lot of trigger foods and food sensitivities. I'm like, let's just, we'll just move on over to here for a little bit and get you over that. So you were the one that really enlighten me on like even with pluck with the organ meats. You're like, look, it's not a gateway to organ means because I don't want to eat organ meat. It's like I told you I have eaten organ meets once and it wasn't I wasn' supposed to get organ meet. I was in London and someone gave me a steak and kidney pie by it was supposed be the steak.

I'm like, it was such a traumatic experience that I will never touch any of that again, but this Pluck stuff is the, and literally I'll tell you, James, when we first got it, I was like yeah, that's disgusting. Tim makes this killer chicken fries in the wonder of an air fryer that is a non-toxic air-fryer. And I am obsessed with them and I said, what do you do? He goes, I want to talk about just the fact that so many people kind of going back to so may people feel overwhelmed, but I think there's also a lot of like anxiety that's coming from people of, like, I got to do it right.

Or there is this person talking that. So what, what kind things out there can you kind to dispel or, you know, even if it's one to two that you think like just don't even listen, don' even go there because it is just going to cause anxiety and it wrong. Right. Well, I love the fact that Brian Johnson is spending so much money and open-sourcing everything he's doing only to come to the conclusion that diet, exercise, relationships, and sleep make the biggest difference, like duh, you know? And that there's a gal who is basically the sane side of all of this movement, who's like, yeah, I don't like it's not consistent.

I exercise, she's got like is the best like slow ager out there. And I think it is because she is not making it her job. Could you imagine like your whole life being what time you go to sleep and getting your perfect sleep score? And like literally had a friend who like didn't want to go do something to mess up their sleep. Like isn't the whole point to make yourself resilient? So if you got to a restaurant and they happen to get some seed oils in your food, you don' turn into a, you know, I don't know.

Yeah, mush. Like you don t just dissolve. And I know we're all in different places in our healing journey. Sometimes when you've had like big mold exposure or something, You've got to be really careful for a while. But our goal would to me is so that occasionally I could stay out late with friends and it's not gonna take me out. And I might have some amazing wine, it is not going to take out, you know, all the things you want to be able to do. Or conversely, go to Park City and go do a really hard hike in altitude with people who live there and be a pull that off too, and stay right up with them.

So I feel like we are majoring in the minors. And then everyone online is arguing about the miners. I know the majors aren't sexy, but boy, if all we did was get people to Eat clean quality protein. Have great non-starchy vegetables and some fruit that are organic and clean and everything else. Most of the healthy fat you probably get out of your protein anyway, so you really wouldn't need to worry much about it. You little olive oil with cooking. got you to move every single day, do something. Some of that being resistance training, some being some, you know, hit for lactate, just some moving every day.

Hopefully outside and hopefully with friends so you have a relationship and get your butt to sleep and make sleep a priority. Like, I mean, 90% of health problems would probably go away. And yet we're worried about which red lights and which, you know, I mean, and hey, i love sauna and red light and all that stuff, but that's do the big things first. Don't worry about buying. I just did a talk for a group and the woman wanted to know all the things she could buy. And I'm like, well, are you like...

Eating your vegetables. Like are you getting your walking meat in? Are you like, you know, your the PEMF mat much as I love them is not gonna be more important than those things Let's make a hierarchy I don't want to move too fast from those points is that we really want focus on the the majors the The basics and if there is someone that's like okay, I've done that What are the kind of tools you've mentioned a few in the episode, but what are those specific tools that maybe your top three that you would be like, you know, if you're ready for tech or these tools, like these are three you should get.

I get asked this, by the way, we're cooking, what three cooking things should you have in your kitchen? And it's like I want to hear what you had in you household, for example. Well, sauna for sure. Okay, infrared or like Swedish or? So we have a fast heat, relaxed sauna that goes to 180 and we a sun lighten infrared. And so what we're actually gonna do is get a sauna space light and rig it into the sunlight and to take that thing up to one 80 so we can have the best of both worlds. I spend most of my time in the sun lighting.

Tim goes back and forth.

Lifestyle tools: sauna, red light, peptides, and hormones 40:00

The next thing is red lights. Now, I am getting infrared in the redlights near and far, but I also have a great red light panel. I have jude one, a sunlight one. And I'm a big redlight fan. Using it for my eyes to help not get macular degeneration. Dr. Ronnie Bonik from Mindshare, she's a menopause-focused eye specialist in New York City, so doing her protocol for that. Skin for collagen for healing helps reduce inflammation, helps with muscle recovery, so I've been using a lot on I have a broken foot.

And then the third thing, I'm kind of obsessed with peptides. So I been a couple different peptide. I had been playing around with different types of GLP-1s. They started playing with them for my son for his traumatic brain injury and he had some neurodegeneration that has turned it around, which is pretty Flippin' amazing. And then we started playing around with it for Tim and I, me mainly for my inflammation and osteoarthritis and autoimmune stuff, and Tim for his APO-B. So we've been seeing some results there, but we're low dosing it.

I'm still playing with which one. Next up is Retatrutide. Retratutide, I always say retrat... I am not sure how to say it, retatratide I think. But I've using Trezapetide and BPC157. Is it TB4 or TB5000? One or the other. Yeah, it's one or other, yeah. I started just using that too. So I use those. My son is using those as well. He's working with this amazing brain guy, Spencer Zimmerman, who's helping him with all that. And then I also started this stuff called pentason polysulfate that I learned about from Dr.

Elizabeth Yurth that is used in vet medicine and used Australia to basically kind of get people 80% of the time all your OA symptoms will basically get better and you improve your joint space. So I'm doing that and just started playing around with Tessamoralin to see if it'll help my deep sleep. Genetically, I am not a good deep-sleeper, so I always looking for an edge there. Those are the things that I've been playing with. I can totally notice a difference when I don't take BPC and TB4, like I in more pain the next day.

indicator that is working, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely working. And then I take hormones, of course, but I've been taking hormones for, you know, 15 years. Do you think every woman at a certain age should start looking at hormones? I think, every women has the right to have that, make that decision. I am glad that they're gonna take some of those warning labels off of hormones. So I was fortunate when all of this started to shift for me that all my friends were hormone docs way ahead of the curve, like back.

in, you know, back literally 15 years ago. So I've been on hormones since the first drop I went on. And that's, to me, when you should start to look at it, When you first start, feel things shift. Ideally, the better your lifestyle is, The better, your diet is better. Your exercise is very sleep is stress management. The more you can prolong it and the less you'll need. But I think, as soon as you start To need them, don't delay. No need to suffer. Yeah. And I said women, but truth is men, men can very much use it as well.

Oh, yeah. Tim's on testosterone and a teeny bit of T3 thyroid. His testosterone was down at 300. We've done some other things too alongside of testosterone therapy to get him so he didn't need as much of the hormone. But it's like men with low testosterone, It's not the same as women because they don't cycle, so there's different stuff. But I mean, they'll have all the things, mild depression, can't build muscle, you know, become insulin resistant, get inflamed. It sounds to me based on this conversation and how I know you, that you really do emphasize, hey, Get tested.

Don't just self-diagnose, correct? What I think is most important is to work with a practitioner who understands this. It's crazy to me, and I've heard it from enough of my friends now, is that menopause wasn't a thing for most of the OB-GYNs in school. So get trained on hormone optimization. I like the idea of hormone optimisation rather than hormone replacement. So to find someone who's been trained, and fortunately in our community we have a lot of people who are amazing with this. And then to look because one of the challenges with lab tests with women, it's very different with men, right?

But with woman, when you're going through perimenopause, they're all over the place. So you're getting the snapshot, but there is some, you know, it's important to look, to also look at how your body's handling the hormones when you start to optimize them to see if you are creating any kind of metabolite issues. So a lot of stuff that can be looked at there, how well you detoxify as well. And that's where you really want to work with someone who this is what they do. Two kind of questions before we close to, one has to do with the community, but before you go there, you mentioned your son's situation and we don't need to go into, because you've covered it a lot, so if anyone wants to know, he had a car accident.

But it seemed, I want to more talk about how it affected you, cause it seems like a really defining moment in your life. So how did that experience rewire your identity and mission? You know what's so funny? Everyone looks at that and goes, okay, how did that change you? And I go, it didn't. Really? It didn''t change me. It just turned the volume up. I believe that we are never better than when we're challenged. And that literally, Wayne Dyer talks about like when you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice.

I remember I had someone who was working with me who I was going through a really tough time, and he just behaved badly. He did things out of integrity. It was just awful. And I'm like, what's up? And he goes, oh, it's just because of this. I go, no, It's revealing who you are. You know, it is not how you show up when things are good that shows who you are. It's how show when you things suck that show who are and what was interesting is my ex-husband and I are the perfect team for my son Grant because it turned the volume up on both of us.

My ex is the most patient, caring, kind person on the planet. He notices every detail, everything, he's a fact finder. I am about the opposite of that. I wouldn't say I'm not kind, but I've not patient. So we are a good combo during all of this. The biggest thing that for me was I'd been trained in my thirties, I had an amazing mentor who taught me that the only limitations are the limitations in your mind. You control your destiny, like your perception creates your reality. beginning of the time when we heard about the accident it was how do we get them to be 110% and getting the doctors who are with us engaged in that mission and if they weren't we got new doctors because we knew if we could not hold that vision that they wouldn't be able to get us to where we wanted to But what do you think?

I feel like in the time I've known of you and known you, something shifted. We had a conversation not too long ago where I was like, I love how you're supporting the industry, you are supporting people and helping to lift them up. And in very much you are a leader. You're so you're representing leadership, female power. But something that's so fascinating is that you also still a learner.

Leadership, resilience, and building a health community 48:00

Like you still, you know, going and trying to, to kind of open up, be more vulnerable. And it's like, You're not just like, oh, I've reached this echelon. I'm good. You are like continuing to expand and grow yourself, which is not always the case with people that are in leadership positions. Has that always been the cases for you? Someone who is in a leadership position who was not doing that will not be in the leadership for long. unless they are like a dictator. And then they'll get overthrown, right?

I mean, truly, if you're an amazing leader, you must always lead by example. I don't know how to be a leader if I'm not in it as well. So it's what's always worked for me is like, I am more excited in the consumer world of things than I've ever been. Like there's so much amazing research and tools and stuff coming out. And then in any professional side, same thing. You look at what starting to unfold. It could be a time where practitioners are scared because of AI, or it could a be time when they realize this is my moment to really double down on who I what I stand for, my personal brand, because that's going to be the differentiator when AI is doing the, you know, a lot of the diagnosing for me.

I'm going become now the coach, the artist and the brand. So I think it's a super cool time. I keep pushing my envelope of comfort zone stuff, but that was my initial mentor was like no growth in your comfort zones. So always looking for things that push me out of that. And that's been everything from like, you know, crazy sports decisions to total plant medicine retreats and everything in between. So I'm pretty much open to all of those things and looking for always what's going to help me get to the next place.

Yeah. Well, I just want to reflect too, because we didn't even go too deep into the community you've been building for years now. We are supporting health practitioners, you're supporting business owners, your supporting men and women to just do to expand their message, to support them in helping more people, whether it's through business, through their own processes, their individual processes or and really how to do it, like tried and true practices through your... Well, I always think of it as the Mindshare Summit, but I know the name is...

The event's gonna stay the mind share summit. We decided to not change it because... It really is a sharing of the minds. The whole group moved to being the health business growth collective because the reality is that's what we do. We help people grow and scale their health businesses. So we want to make it obvious. But then when you're at that level, you come to the summit because you are at a point where you can really collaborate, share best practices, network, all of that. Collaboration, though, is a key word.

I think you're in an extremely powerful model of that, of like that you are not just out for yourself. You are here to collaborate. Who do you serve? I know that's one of the questions that have everyone answer in the collective, but I've never heard who you served. So I have two audiences that I really love. One of them on the consumer side is, again, that woman who has been lied to by her bathroom scale for years and beaten herself up and can make such a shift by simply moving into looking at body composition, improving fat-free mass first, and doing that by eating protein first.

You know, starting resistance training, making sure you've got good recovery, but putting yourself first and then on the business side is really that health business owner that is doing something, they're a rebel. They have stepped outside of the system. If you look at what's happened in big healthcare now and big insurance and Big Pharma, it really more and more doctors are just getting pulled into the System and where they can't practice the way that they know to be true. And what we found is that This works until someone in their family gets sick or they get sick and all of a sudden they don't have the tools and they realize what they're doing, you know, won't work.

And they start looking outside and once they do and find things outside, they go, oh, I can never unsee this, but now I need a way to practice in this way. So I am dedicated to showing those people how to do whatever it is. Like what you're is doing is rebellious. Organ meats as seasonings, come on. So whatever those things are, helping them create a business that's a legacy, because for me, the selfish piece of that is early on when I was starting out, I thought, gosh, you want to help a million people get healthy.

And then I on Dr. Phil for two years, like pretty much every week. I knew what his audience reach was. It was like 30 million at the time. So I'm like, cool. All right. How do you help billion? You help by helping others do the same. And I think, you know, if we help 10,000, we'll get way past a billion, because we're at like 400 million now, and we probably helped, hmm, probably help 5,004, so, You know. We'll see. we will see how many it's really going to take to get there, but I'm thinking 10 thousand.

I know it's affected Margaret and myself. So I just honor you for all that work you're doing and how much you are. I said earlier, like a go-giver and a Go-getter. Like you, you you move in the needle, but you also giving back in ways that I don't see everyone doing. Yeah, I want to honor your for that. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really. I hope everyone watching or listening has been able to take something away, because for me, there's been so much gold. So thank you, JJ. Thank you.

By the way, I don't know if I've ever asked or looked this up, but what does the J in the j stand for? Do you ever reveal that? It's not that exciting. When I was at UCLA, aerobics in Japan. And I got off the plane and it said, there was a sign that literally said welcome, W-E-R-C-O-M-S-A-N, J-U- R-I- S- A- N. Welcome, Jurisan. My name then was Julie Johnson. they couldn't pronounce it. I became JJ when I lived in Japan because that was easier to pronounce. It sounds better JJ but you know there you go.

So I came home from that that time in japan JJ and I never changed it I love it i was a JJ too after uh just after college for a little bit so yeah that's cool well thank you again take care and thank y'all for joining us Let us know what you think. Leave a review, leave a comment, but we look forward to hearing from you.