Episode 415:JJ Virgin's Powerful Aging Secrets: Muscle, Metabolism, GLP-1 and Fitness Habits

Have you ever wondered what it really takes to achieve optimal health and fitness as you age? Or if you're doing it all wrong - making all the common fitness mistakes? In this Habits and Hustle podcast episode, I am joined by JJ Virgin, 4-time New York Times bestselling author in the fitness and health space, to discuss the truth about healthy aging. We dive into her expert insights on powerful aging, the critical role of skeletal muscle for metabolism and longevity, and her personal daily routine for optimal health in her 60s. We also discuss the pros and cons of GLP-1 medications for weight loss, popular fitness habits that can actually be detrimental, and so much more! JJ Virgin is a triple-board certified nutrition expert and Fitness Hall of Famer who has built multiple successful businesses, including the influential Mindshare Collaborative and a 7-figure personal brand. As a prominent media personality, she has co-hosted TLC's Freaky Eaters, appeared on major TV shows, and authored four NY Times bestsellers including The Virgin Diet and Warrior Mom. Her impact extends through her massive social media following, popular Well Beyond 40 podcast with over 20 million downloads, and role as a transformational leadership coach who has worked with notable figures in the health industry. What We Discuss: (06:11) The Essentials of Longevity and Fitness (12:55) Hormone Replacement Therapy and Creatine (19:22) Benefits of Creatine for Women (23:11) Body Composition, Creatine, and Daily Routine (34:29) Morning Routine and Fitness Workouts (41:09) Functional HIIT Training and Fitness Routine (45:06) GLP-1s and Metabolic Health (58:42) Nutrition, Fitness, and Healthy Habits …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: AquaTru: Get 20% off any purifier at aquatru.com http://aquatru.com/ with code HUSTLE Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com http://truniagen.com/ and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from JJ Virgin: Website: https://jjvirgin.com/ Podcast: https://jjvirgin.com/main-podcasts/ Instagram: @jj.virgin https://www.instagram.com/jj.virgin/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:09Jen Cohen?

  Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor Therasage. Their Trillight Panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go. And I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for.

• 0:51Jen Cohen?

  I personally use Therasage Trillight everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therasage.com right now and use code BEBOULLED for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com, and use code BEBOULLED for 15% off any of their products.

• 1:31Jen Cohen?

  So I was just gonna say a quick, like, two sentences about JJ Virgin. Because JJ Virgin has, you've had like how many New York Times bestselling books in the fitness and health space?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Four.

• 1:42Jen Cohen?

  Four, okay.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Four.

• 1:43Jen Cohen?

  And you are one of my go-tos for information. Because what I love about you is that you're really good at breaking down sometimes very complicated matters or things that may be just kind of like overwhelming into layman's terms. And I appreciate that about you. So I love that you're on my podcast today.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Well, thank you very much. I took a personality test and I am a simplifier.

• 2:06Jen Cohen?

  Really? Oh, which one? Which one did you take?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  I forget which one this one was. Like, usually all the ones all say the same thing, but this was a totally different test. And it gave four different ways people behave in business, and I'm a simplifier. And I go, that's absolutely true.

• 2:21Jen Cohen?

  That is, and now, and you've been doing this for how many years now? Thirty? Like, how many years?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Almost. Well, truthfully, I started teaching calisthenics and tap dance in high school. So if you count the calisthenics in high school, it's over forty.

• 2:37Jen Cohen?

  Wow. So you came by this honestly. This has always been a very big piece of your life.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  It's only been, all I've ever done is, is health and wellness. Like, I was catering, but healthy food catering. You know, I did want to be an actress, but then I, you know, switched off of that.

• 2:54Jen Cohen?

  So is it, I know, so is it something that you always just inherently had an interest for? Or was there like a, a, a reason? Like, a lot of times I find people who are like, fitness experts are typically because they had some kind of like issue. They were overweight as a kid, or they had to like, overcome something where, you know, they went into this, they went into this space because of something that they had. Or was it just like, a, a love for athletics, or tap dancing, or what was it?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  I've always loved exercise and nutrition, like, always. From when I was twelve. I mean, actually, you know, I started dance class at three, and acrobatics. I've always loved it.

• 3:34Jen Cohen?

  And, but I think, what, I want to ask you this, because I feel like, over the years, right? Everything kind of has, like, their fads and trends, and ebbs and flows, right?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:44Jen Cohen?

  And sometimes people don't want to know and hear about the actual things that work, right? Like, you know, basically eating properly, exercising a certain amount. There's all this like longevity hacks, and health hacks, and fitness trends. What would you say, over the years, right? Would you say have been kind of, you think, that stands the test of time? That are the things that actually move the needle, that people don't want to know? That they should do, and without the fluff?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what, I, I love the fact that Brian Johnson's spending two million dollars a year to find out that diet, exercise, sleep, and good relationships are what make you healthy and extend your life span. I was like, no duh. And when you get down to it, moving and eating and sleeping.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Are the things, like they're the things. And I was just at this really cool conference this weekend, Udomonia, and someone was supposed to be, you know, because my buddy, Dave, has been out saying that you can like hack your exercise to 20 minutes a week or something ridiculous. And I'm like, no, you can't. No, you cannot. You can't hack these things because you just got to move more. It's like flossing. So, you know, there's just certain things that you just have to do. And if anything, as we get more and more into this, I feel like exercise used to be this kind of nice to do thing. But as we move into the longevity space, it's not an optional. It is a must do thing.

• 5:18Jen Cohen?

  Well, yeah, my concern with, and I cover, I talk about longevity all the time. I do so many things myself. And like, people are always saying to me, well, does that work? Does that actually work? And honest to God, I don't know. Right? Because I'm like, you do so many things. You're not, you don't know what works, what doesn't work. What do you say and what do you feel are the things that work, like for sure? Like, give me, like, when you're saying diet and exercise, okay, we got that. Is there a particular diet?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  That's a broad brush, though, Jen.

• 5:46Jen Cohen?

  Yes, exactly.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, what could that be? And here's the thing, I think it's a hierarchy. What I see in the space that drives me bananas is that we are majoring in the minors. Like, I'm sorry, I'm not worried about your red light therapy if you are not moving. You know, you're sitting here trying to pump up your mitochondria with red light. Why don't you just do a little HIIT training? So I think there's some things that are nice to have, but there are some foundational things that it is so clear that we need to have. And like, when you come down to it, it's having, it's having skeletal muscle that's high quality, it's strong, it's powerful, it's having a great heart that you've pushed

• 6:28Speaker 02

  by doing high intensity interval training. And it's moving more all throughout the day because we were meant to move.

• 6:34Jen Cohen?

  Right. I mean, how have you changed your workouts over the years?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Well, it's pretty interesting. You know, when I was in graduate school, we were taught, I kid you not, we were taught, do not have people lift weights until they lose the weight. Now, I was paying my way through graduate school as one of those first personal trainers. And what I quickly discovered was they weren't going to get any better unless I had them lifting weights. Like, nothing was changing. Weights are like your metabolic spanks that holds everything in tighter, gets you insulin sensitive, boosts your metabolism. So I just ignored. And most of my professors were like overweight, which I thought bizarre and made no sense, right? Especially when you got in the nutrition department. The exercise department, not as much as the nutrition department. And in the nutrition department, I was taught that you could get everything you needed from a potato. From women that literally looked

• 7:25Speaker 02

  like potatoes. I'm like, how are we going to get optimal protein from that potato right there? Now, if we're on Mars and this is all we have, okay, fine. But other than that, I think we can do better. So I literally, way back then, everything was about cardio. And at first, I was doing loads and loads of cardio. And then I did a massive flip early on into resistance training and high intensity interval training. And I never looked back, mainly because I hate doing endurance cardio. It's not fun. It takes up a lot of time. But in my twenties, I was doing a lot of it and a lot of resistance training. And what's interesting is I have more muscle, I'm stronger now than I was in my twenties, because I was doing loads of cardio and loads of resistance training.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  I dumped a lot of the cardio, flipped it into high intensity interval training. I, you know, walk and ruck. And I'm now, you know, more ripped than I am now than I was then.

• 8:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, you look insanely good. I mean, I was gonna ask you, are you on, like, are you doing HRT or something?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  You're on steroids.

• 8:24Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, you on something? Well, no, because you're so ripped. And if you don't mind me asking, how old are you?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  So I'm sixty wonderful.

• 8:32Jen Cohen?

  Sixty wonderful, okay.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Sixty wonderful. And I'm an open book. I'll tell you everything I'm doing. I've been on hormone replacement therapy from the moment my hormones started to shift. And here's what was super cool about that. So when I was on Dr. Phil, he had a little chapter in his book called Weight Loss Resistance. And I thought, that, what a concept. I fell In love with this idea because working in real life, working in the wild, I saw people that were eating, eating right, exercising and stuck, especially, you know, perimenopausal women. And this whole idea that nothing changes when you're perimenopausal, your metabolism stays the same is gotta be men saying that. Not one perimenopausal woman will say that to you, I don't think.

• 9:13Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  You know?

• 9:14Jen Cohen?

  And when did you start? Cause I think that's a big question that people are very confused with.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Well, you, yeah, you start when things start to shift. So that's different for everybody. That could be late 30s, it could be early 40s. For me, early 40s, I think I was around 44. I remember all of a sudden, I used to always be the sweaty one, like sweaty, sweaty, sweaty, you know? And all of a sudden I'm cold and I got a little constipated and I started to lose my eyebrow. And this happened like that. And one of my friends was an integrative med doc who was like, looked at my TSH, which was 2.25, I remember, totally in the range. And I was hypothyroid. And the minute he gave me a little thyroid, it's like the lights came back on, everything normalized. The next thing that happened was I could not recover

• 10:02Speaker 02

  from my workouts like I used to. Now I know from, you know, Dr. Vonda Wright, that this is musculoskeletal syndrome due to menopause. But back then I was like, I had no clue. I was just like, what is going on? And my, my gums started to bleed a little bit and my dentist's like, that's low estrogen. So the minute these things started to show up, I started to treat it. So I started first with thyroid, then I did a little testosterone, which helped bring my estrogen back. I never did progesterone until I started to really use estrogen consistently because for me, progesterone makes me gain weight and weep.

• 10:38Jen Cohen?

  It just. Yeah. Wow.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I never felt good on it. In fact, we had a doctor in Palm Desert, California, who literally, he was a nut job. He put everybody on progesterone therapy, men and women. He thought everyone was progesterone deficient and you would put them on like 100, 200 milligrams every single day. And then he put everyone on thyroid with the goal to drive their TSH to as close To zero as possible. I mean, horrible. And he put me on progesterone. I gained 12 pounds in a week. I was like, okay, this is not for me. So now, once I started to get, you know, more into perimenopause, I could, I started to cycle it in, but low dose where, you know, most people are doing about 100 milligrams. I was doing 50. So I never could use that. And that's why I say these things.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  You have to know the symptoms of the different hormones and what's low and really where your ideal levels would be and pay a close attention because there's no way a doctor is going to know that. They won't know how you're feeling. They're not inside, you know, in with you. But I literally have been on hormones since my, you know, what, mid 40s.

• 11:41Jen Cohen?

  And do you feel at this, like at this stage, are you still having to tweak it depending on different things? Or now you have it like, is it dialed in at a certain point?

• 11:51Speaker 02

  It's dialed in. What was interesting is, you know, once you get through menopause, life is so, it's fabulous. It's, I always say, you know, there's two amazing things. Empty nesting and menopause. These are like amazing things that I hear people go, oh, my God, empty nesting. I'm like, it's the greatest thing ever.

• 12:09Jen Cohen?

  Right. You have your life back.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  It's fantastic. They come over, they leave. It's awesome. You know,

• 12:15Jen Cohen?

  How old are your kids, by the way?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  They're 27 and 28.

• 12:18Jen Cohen?

  Okay, that's great. Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yes. So menopause, once your hormones are stabilized, it's the perimenopause that's like crazy because it's, you know, you're trying to like shift things when they're all over the place and trying to supplement that way. The only time I had to shift this a little bit is I went to Korea a couple of years ago and got on this very special ginseng and it made my hormone receptors more sensitive and I was able to lower my doses, which was pretty cool.

• 12:44Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  So I know I didn't put it together until I was hearing a lecture at A4M and I went, oh, that's what happened. I was like, what happened?

• 12:52Jen Cohen?

  That's, so I find that like, the problem is that I hear a lot with me. I get, I get asked this a bunch, like if people are going on testosterone, but they're not doing estrogen yet. And like, you know, there's so much information out there and I think people then stop, they don't even do anything because they're like, it's basically like, And analysis paralysis, right? You don't know what to do, so you don't do anything.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  You find a really good doctor that knows this stuff that actually specializes in menopause, right? Which is amazing that you could be in a gynecologist and not trained in menopause, and you'll hear all of them telling you, yeah, we didn't get trained in it. So you find someone trained in hormone replacement therapy, because you might need testosterone and not estrogen. You might, you know, it's like, everybody is different. And there's no, it's not like the guy in Palm Desert with standard dosing. That's crazy. That makes no sense.

• 13:42Jen Cohen?

  What about supplementation? For example, creatine is a big, hot, is a hot topic now. Everyone, everyone's talking about it. And I think women are still very nervous about creatine, because we remember that people, like men, who are, who are always taking creatine, and they look big and bulky. What's your stance on creatine? Do you take it?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  So I just came out with a product, actually, I launched it at Unimonia called, my husband named this, wait for it, Shiitine.

• 14:10Jen Cohen?

  Oh, cute. I like it.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Okay, here's what happened. So if I could go back in time and tell my younger self something, it would have been, start creatine in your teens. Now, I was training people at Gold's Gym in Venice, and they were all, and there were all those big dudes, and they all took creatine. I'm like, I'll have none of that, thank you, right?

• 14:30Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  And, you know, creatine does not make you have big muscles. It doesn't. If it does, if it did, it would be banned substance. What creatine does is it gives your body creatine for the phosphocreatine system to make ATP. So it helps you make energy. And creatine is in your muscles and in your brain. If you have enough, if you don't have enough, it's not going to be in your brain. But it's in your muscles and your brain. I think it is the single most important supplement, beyond the basics of like D and K, magnesium and fish oil, for women 40 plus. I think it should be an absolute, you need this for a couple of different reasons. Number one, it's going to help with energy production. And one of the biggest complaints as women start to get into perimenopause

• 15:15Speaker 02

  is that they have more energy. This can help, and it can help not just with body, but can help. With mental, like with focus, with mood. In fact, there was a study done on postmenopausal women on SSRIs. And those who did creatine actually had way better changes in their mood than those who didn't. They're now doing studies on it for neurodegenerative diseases and for cognition. So it helps you work out harder because of the energy. It also helps you with recovery, but it doesn't build. You don't take creatine, sit on the couch and something happens. Now, here's what happened is I started to dig into this a couple of years ago. I looked at, I'm like, everybody needs to be on this, right? And especially women, we have less tissue stores of this than men do.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  So I was like, we need this and we need it in our brains. And so I was like, you know, pushing it, I was a creatine pusher. And everything I'd ever heard was monohydrate, it's the most studied. So do that one, which is true. It's the most studied, but it's kind of like, you know, a rotary phone. Just because we've always used it, doesn't mean that's the best one, right? I mean, would you switch over, you know, would you still be using a rotary phone at this point? No, you would not. So what I kept hearing back from women, and these were some of my closest friends who are doctors, who are like, I'm not going to take it. I don't like the way I feel. I feel bloated, my stomach hurts. I was like, just get through it and they wouldn't. And I go, this is a problem. Well, a year and a half ago, I was speaking at a medical conference and talking about powerful aging.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  And I talked about creatine and this, this researcher followed me out. And he had, he's the one who developed and patented creatine HCl and showed me all the research showing that creatine monohydrate, about 15% of it actually gets into your bloodstream. And so that other stuff is causing some of that extracellular fluid retention, some of the GI issues. And that, so he went to solve the problem and created an HCl version that all of it gets into the bloodstream. So you need a seventh of the dose and you don't get those side effects that are, you know, frustrating women. So I wouldn't have done this, except I kept hearing from women and hearing, I was like, all right. So that's what I created was a creatine HCl.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And what you'll hear out there is, well, monohydrate is the one you should take. It's the most studied and all the rest are marketing hypes and they're just more expensive. Except the reality is you need a smidge compared to the monohydrate. So BS. And I had all the research studies to show this uptake and it's significant. So it's pretty interesting. So that's what we just launched because I want women to take it and I know how crazy we get with weight.

• 17:49Jen Cohen?

  We do, and of course we do. It's all psychological. That's why we are cardio junkies, right? Because we think if we're sweating harder and we're moving faster and we're doing it longer, that we're getting a better result. And that's like the same thing like the, I think-

• 18:02Speaker 02

  That's so eighties.

• 18:03Jen Cohen?

  It's so eighties, but the truth is, but yet that's what you see. Like, there was a great meme was, that was going around that someone sent me of like, middle-aged women exercising, they're doing everything but with the exercises they should be doing, you know, they're like bouncing on a swing outside, or they're doing-

• 18:19Speaker 02

  They're on the rebounder.

• 18:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, they're on the rebounder. That was one of them.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Do you remember the rebounder? We, so when I was at UCLA, I still remember this in the sorority house, because somewhere, the idea was like, you could burn 100 calories with 10 minutes of rebounding. So, literally, people were like, pigging out and jumping on the rebounder.

• 18:38Jen Cohen?

  Totally.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  I mean, our body is not a bank account. I mean, come on.

• 18:42Jen Cohen?

  It's true. And I, I feel like, listen, the way I look at it is like, some movement's better than zero movement, so all the power to you. But if you want to change your body composition, it's not going to be doing that. And that's just the bottom line. You don't have to, you don't have to believe it, but you'll, you know, the proof is in-

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Hey, it's just, it's just science, you know? And here's the big challenge is, unless you're tracking your body composition, you wouldn't know anyway. And this is why we have to move off of weight, and we have to go to what that weight's made up of. Because, you know, my husband, case in point, weighs the same as he's always weighed. And he's always been athletic. He's a volleyball player, he was a baseball player. And so, a couple years ago, we go get our DEXA scans, because I'm like, I'm getting in the best shape of my life for 60, so I trot him on in there. He's always like, we'll go along with whatever I come up with. And he was a skinny fat. He was 25% body fat, which is high for a

• 19:40Speaker 02

  man, you know? And he was, he was a skinny fat. I was like, way lower than him. And I was like, wow. I, first off, like, the machine must be wrong, except it can't be wrong. It can't be that wrong, right?

• 19:53Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  So, we completely shifted his programming. He, he'd been resistant to going on testosterone, he had lower T, gets on testosterone therapy, but also starts finally tracking his protein and getting the protein that he needed, starts finally doing his creatine, like he does all the things that I'd been like, yakking about to do. He does them all, starts lifting heavier- And he goes, he drops 27 pounds of fat and puts on 24 pounds of muscle. Now, three pound change, looks like an entirely different body. I mean, like, this is like, he looks like a high school, you know, volleyball player body now.

• 20:30Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  It's a three pound change, three pounds. He went from 25% body fat to 10% body fat.

• 20:38Jen Cohen?

  And so is it because he also, he was doing heavier weight more consistently? And he dropped the other kind of more of a cardio, like biking, volleyball, whatever.

• 20:48Speaker 02

  He was never doing, he does volleyball, he'll do that for HIIT training. He was never doing, like, when I met him, he was drinking smoothies with, like, juice and running. So we stopped that quickly. But, you know, he was not doing heavy, heavy weights and he wasn't eating enough protein and he wasn't consistent with things like creatine until he got the DEXA. And that's why these things are so important. Because when you see it in real life, like, you can't go, oh, you know, because he looked fine. You would never have thought anything of it, but the difference now is insane.

• 21:22Jen Cohen?

  Wow. No, I know. I think a big issue with is bloating. Women get bloated because the amounts that maybe they're taking. Is there a way to eliminate bloating from taking creatine? Is it just the amount? Is there other things that we should be?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  Creatine, HCl, you won't get bloated.

• 21:37Jen Cohen?

  So you won't get bloated with that one?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  No, you may get a little bit of fluid into your muscles if you're lucky. That's what you want to have happen. You might get a little bit of it. If anything, it would be a half pound to a pound that would normalize. But you want that. Like, if you could get that, you should celebrate it.

• 21:57Jen Cohen?

  So you didn't get that?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  I wish I had, because that's good. Like, remember, when you're doing bioimpedance scales at home to check your total body, your body composition, it looks at total body water. Because total body water is how we look at fat-free mass. More muscle, more water in the muscle, right? So we look at that number. You want more of that. So you might get a teensy bit of it, but that's the whole reason I switched to HCL. HCL is you don't have to take the higher doses. The dosing is somewhere between 750 milligrams to 1.5 grams. I mean, it's tiny doses, so you don't have to take a lot. And by the way, the other cool thing with creatine, I did a lot, I've been like last summer did so much international travel,

• 22:42Speaker 02

  jumping time zones, and I read about it for, for sleep deprivation. It's the best jet lag formula there ever has been. It's amazing.

• 22:51Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, like solved my problems.

• 22:54Jen Cohen?

  So does it help you fall asleep or is it just?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  No, it gives you that energy. So what I do is like the minute I land, I take some and then I'll take it like two more doses throughout the day.

• 23:05Jen Cohen?

  Interesting.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:06Jen Cohen?

  I actually, I actually read a study that was saying that if you are sleep deprived and you take creatine, it will, that the creatine will actually help your mental performance because of you're taking the creatine with sleep deprivation.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  So I need enough.

• 23:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Your muscles were preferentially, preferentially use it and you need enough to get into your brain too. So I pop a little bit more when I'm, when I'm traveling to make sure I have it. Like some of these neurodegenerative studies now, the company that has the patent on this HCL, I turned them on to some big top, if I said their names, you would know them, brain researchers who are using it now in their brain studies. Cause you know, they don't have to now use 20 grams of monohydrate, which is what they were doing, which was causing GI distress. Now they can use a couple of grams.

• 23:52Jen Cohen?

  Oh my God, I want to try this. It's called.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  I'll send you some.

• 23:55Jen Cohen?

  Please do. Yeah, I'm going to send it to you. I, I really will because I haven't started to take creatine because I'm one of those girls, women, who don't want to be bloated, who don't want to do all that. And so I was like.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Bloated. Who says, you know what, sign me up for that bloat.

• 24:08Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that's the, exactly. And the thing is I'm not a shake person, right? I don't believe in these shakes, shakes can, you, you end up having a thousand calories in a shake and mostly sugar. So I like to actually eat real food. Are you mixing creatine with water or how do you do it?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  So I have two different ways I have it. One is in capsules. I put it together with taurine and magnesium because I wanted a little ATP booster. And both of those, I mean, we know taurine helps with longevity, but both of those help make ATP. So I was like, and we never seemed to get enough of this stuff. So I was like, I'll put that all together. So I created, that's the product I created and it's in capsules. You take three and you can take another dose. Like I'll take three as my foundation. Then if I'm going to the gym, I'll take another three or you can use the powder and throw it. What I like to do when I'm going to the gym is electrolytes, creatine and some essential amino acids.

• 25:04Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, okay. So tell me the day in the life. I want to know all these things. I want, I'm going to, I have a pen too, because I think these are, I know, I think this is like, I love this. It's what it's about, right? Habits and hustle. I want to know what time you wake up, what you do every day. Go, let me know.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  What do I do every day? I wake up, I take my thyroid.

• 25:23Jen Cohen?

  What time do you wake up? I want to know the time.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Generally, I'm waking up right now. I'm a little like, I woke up at four 30 because I have some stuff going on business wise that I was processing. But I got up at five 30, but normally, once it's not daylight saving stupid, I think this is the dumbest thing ever.

• 25:41Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  About six 30.

• 25:43Jen Cohen?

  Okay. And what do you do? What's the first thing? Okay, so what is your routine? What's your morning routine?

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been playing around with it because I was doing meditation every single morning. And now I kind of have been reading instead. So I get up, I do my thyroid. My husband hits the coffee, most importantly. And then I always get on the bioimpedance scale. It reports to my phone. I always watch the trend lines. So I believe that we should weigh in every single day. I travel with a bioimpedance scale. I have one at home and they go into my phone. So, you know, I don't pay attention to it so much as I'm just, we'll check to make sure. Because here's the thing, twice I have had weird weight gain. Once during the pandemic and then once when I landed in Spain, where literally my weight would go up a pound or two every day. And one time it was an autoimmune thing going on. Another time it was because I changed my thyroid.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  medication and didn't pay attention to the fact that like I went from what I normally do over to armor and literally gained six pounds in like three days. So if you're not weighing in, you wouldn't know, right?

• 26:46Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Other part of that is when you're shifting your body composition called recomping, right? You're you're putting on muscle and I think for all of us, our biggest goal should be to pack on as much muscle as humanly possible. Which if I'm lucky, maybe I could put on another four pounds in a year at this point, you know? It's like really hard once you're kind of where you can get to.

• 27:05Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  If I'm not watching that, I'd never know. So we do a DEXA scan once or twice a year and then I'm monitoring that at home. So do my do my little thing. Right now I'm I'm doing reading and journaling. And then I do my depends on the day if I'm home, I like to get into my little hot sauna. I have a quick heat sauna and then I'll go into the cold plunge.

• 27:30Jen Cohen?

  So like what kind of sauna you got like a therasage, the ones that are like.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  So we have a relax. Yeah, it's like a relax or a therasage, those one person ones. So we have two saunas at home. We have the big infrared one. And I think of all of the things, you know, the red light and all the stuff. Sauna to me is like the one that I think is the most important, right?

• 27:50Jen Cohen?

  I agree. I agree. And you do that in the morning?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the reason being we'll do sauna, the infrared sauna at night and watch Netflix in there. But in the morning, 10 minutes and then I can get in the cold plunge and I'm far enough away from my workout. Like the last thing I want to do, I could come home and get in the sauna. That'd be great after a workout, but I can't get into the cold plunge because that can then blunt muscle protein synthesis by blocking the inflammatory response. So I do the cold in the morning.

• 28:21Jen Cohen?

  So you do that, okay. And then you do the rapid sauna in the morning for 10 minutes. Do you get sweaty 10 minutes, you get sweaty in there?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I always do it before my husband because he like I'm in there and I either do my little red red light collagen mask, which I can't tell if it's working. Everyone asks, is it working? I don't know. I don't know if any of that stuff, I have no clue. Like I've got the big red light panel. How would we know? Like, I don't know.

• 28:44Jen Cohen?

  Exactly, I agree.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  You know, it's, so my husband puts the neck thing on, hat on, like, so I never

• 28:52Jen Cohen?

  The whole thing.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  The sauna after him, it's absolutely nasty. So I have to get in there first or it's not gonna happen.

• 28:59Jen Cohen?

  I'm curious, hold on, I'm sorry. I'm curious with the Rafa one, because I have one here. I'm looking at it. It's a Ferrisage red light. It's like an indoor, you, it's like, you know, it's canvas.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  The zipper one you said?

• 29:09Jen Cohen?

  Yes, yes. Same one? You have the same type? Okay.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's that, it's that type. But then I have the big thing from Sunlighten, that's the far near, right? That one.

• 29:19Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. I have the clear light I'm looking at too, but you're right. It can't get, in the morning, it's like a whole thing to get in there and the whole thing.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:26Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, that's like a whole long thing and you have to turn it on and block.

• 29:30Jen Cohen?

  Yes. It's gonna get the heat up. It's like, I know, it's like, not two seconds. Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's not two seconds. So, so there's that. And then generally, morning brain is my money brain. So I have my thinking things. And you know what happens is I always have projects that I need to do. And I never know, this is why I could never be a professional writer, because I never know what's gonna pop out and beg to be thought of. And, you know, so usually something comes out of my head that's important in the morning and I work on it. And then I eat breakfast. You're gonna ask what? So I'll tell you, currently, I have been playing around with dairy, Greek style yogurt. For a long time, I couldn't eat dairy, then it looked like my gut was healed and I'm back on dairy. Although I just, now I'm, I'm doing another food sensitivity test to see how I'm doing with it. So I think

• 30:17Speaker 02

  I'm cool with it. So what I've been doing is doing Greek style yogurt and stirring in bone broth protein powder. So I have a bone broth protein powder, 80% collagen. I stir it into the Greek style yogurt. So I'm getting everything. So that's what I like to do.

• 30:30Jen Cohen?

  That's a good idea. I'm so sick of eggs. I need to eat protein in the morning. That's a really good idea.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Well, and you don't get enough from eggs. You have to do eggs plus egg whites.

• 30:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I do that. By the way, that's what I do, but I didn't realize you can't get enough from eggs. What do you mean?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Well, you could, but you're gonna get a, think about it, each egg, depending on the size of the egg, is maybe six grams of protein.

• 30:51Jen Cohen?

  Mm hmm. That's true. So I add.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  So you'd have to eat five eggs.

• 30:55Jen Cohen?

  Hmm. I add, I do two eggs and I add about three egg whites. Is that kind of fine?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Probably need a couple more egg whites. Maybe another, at least another egg white.

• 31:04Jen Cohen?

  Really? Wow. I feel like also the, if you eat, I mean, I think for me, what happened was my, now I'm like, like I'm sensitive to eggs. So I've been eating them every day.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  I don't like to eat like eggs or dairy. When I did all of the food sensitivity testing that drove me to write the Virgin Diet, the like, and I looked at so many, so many food sensitivity tests. And then I talked to the head of the lab and I'm like, I see number one, eggs and dairy, eggs and dairy, eggs and dairy, eggs and dairy. Number two was corn, soy, peanuts. You know, gluten's another type of test. So where you might see wheat, you're really looking at gluten. Gluten drives gut permeability anyway. But, you know, I just think it's something we have to be careful about getting into the everyday, everyday, everyday with, that we got to rotate these things, which is hard because it's so easy to get into a breakfast habit. Like of all the things, like I know we do for dinner every night and it's super

• 31:58Speaker 02

  easy, but we rotate, but breakfast, it's like, who wants to think about it?

• 32:02Jen Cohen?

  No, I know. And then, by the way, are you, are you like not an oatmeal? I mean, because protein in the morning, I know you're gonna say that. But what about oatmeal? Remember when oatmeal was a thing and people loved oatmeal? Do you ever eat oatmeal in the morning? Or that's such a shonda?

• 32:15Speaker 02

  You know what? I think there's some great things with oatmeal. I don't think it's peasant food, but I don't feel good when I do it. Like, I love oatmeal, but I could have like maybe a half a cup and then have the other stuff. But I find that I feel best when I eat mainly protein with some fat in the morning. You know, like take that yogurt, throw in some freshly ground flaxseed meal, something like that. And then I go off to the gym with my essential aminos and my creatine and my electrolytes. And then I come back and generally I'll have protein and carbs as my lunch. So whatever we make for dinner, we always make a bunch of. And if we ended up like plowing through all of our protein we made for dinner, we always have some grass fed ground beef that we can make up. So like

• 33:00Speaker 02

  today at lunch, I had grass fed beef patties and blackberries and blueberries.

• 33:06Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I love that. Okay, wait. So then we're not even, okay, why are we not, JJ, you're going ahead of me. So basically, you have your breakfast and then you go to the gym, you take, and then each workout is how long?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  So I either go upstairs because I have an amazing gym that I created upstairs, or I go to the gym. My husband likes to go to the gym. He likes the whole thing. I'm pretty self-guided, so I can do whichever. If I'm gonna do my high-intensity functional training, generally I'll do that as more exercise snacks throughout the day. But if I'm doing it as actual workout, then, you know, I like to do that at home because I would look like a freak at the gym doing it.

• 33:43Jen Cohen?

  What are you doing? Like, tell me what you're doing. What does it look like?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  So, it's so funny. So for Udomonia Summit, they're like, "We'd love you to teach an exercise class." And I'm thinking to myself, "I have not taught an exercise class since, for 25 years." "Okay, I'll do it." And then I was like, "What the heck am I gonna teach?" And, and with no weights, you know, because I was like, "I'll teach how to, you know, an upper body workout." Oh, I couldn't because there were no weights. So what I taught was high-intensity functional training, right? So it's doing HIIT, where we know we could do HIIT with sprinting or running upstairs, but this is functional movements like mountain climbers, or burpees, or jumping jacks, or air jumps, squats, jumps, right? So it's functional movements done in a, in a high-intensity way.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  So if I, if I'm doing that stuff at home, what I like to do, I have a sprint treadmill. So I'll do some rounds of the sprint treadmill, then I have an exciser, and I'll do overhead push-pull while I'm on the exciser, which is this mini stepper. Then I'll get on, do box jumps, then I'll do some up-downs, then I'll do some mountain climbers. And sometimes I have a power plate that they just sent me that I'm playing around with. So I'll do things, you know, jumps over that. So I've been just, I like to mess around with all the different things. And the way I do it is I make a list of all possible stuff, and then I just start to check off because I like to, I'm very goal-oriented. So I just play around and mess around with all these different things, which you wouldn't be able to do at the gym, you know?

• 35:10Jen Cohen?

  No, you cannot. And how long do you, how long do you work out for about?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Well, if I'm doing high intensity functional training, it depends on the way I'm trying to do it. But I mean, you know, like I did it for Udemonia and everyone was pretty much destroyed in 20. We did 20 minutes total, but we did it in two to three minute bursts. That had some intensity and then a little bit of recoveries in them and people were just like done.

• 35:35Jen Cohen?

  Done, yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Done. And then here's what's cool. At the end of it, I learned this from Gabby Reece. She said, she taught me this on this podcast we did. And I'm like, that's the smartest thing I've ever heard. I put balance training at the end. Because that's tired, you know, when are you going to have a problem with balance? When you're tired. I was like, oh, that's brilliant. So I had everyone do balance stuff at the end, which were all falling over. So it was great.

• 35:58Jen Cohen?

  That's a good idea. I like Gabby. That's a good idea.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  It's so smart.

• 36:02Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  She's a smarty pants. Anyway, so basically it depends on what's going on. Like if I'm doing HIIT training, it may be 20 minutes, 30 minutes max, you know? If I'm doing resistance training, might be 40 minutes. Just depends, depends what I'm doing. I like to put everything, I've got the body divided into upper body pushing, upper body pulling, and then hips and thigh. I don't, every once in a while I'll throw some core work in, but the reality is I'm doing squats and pushups and mountain climbers. So it's like my core is working.

• 36:33Jen Cohen?

  It's all the same stuff. So basically you're saying all the same things we've always done. You're just doing it at a high intensity and that's how you do it. But you're saying rucking. Rucking is like, again, this is another one of these fitness trends. I mean, it's been around forever.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  It's not a fitness trend. We did it when we went to school.

• 36:48Jen Cohen?

  We did, well, I was gonna say it's a fitness trend, which is not even a trend. I mean, it's like you're basically wearing a weighted vest or a knapsack or whatever.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Basically doing the backpack you used to wear to school that now they don't anymore. Now we're just doing it, you know, it's like the stuff you did when you were eight, we're doing it again.

• 37:05Jen Cohen?

  100%.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Tarts.

• 37:07Jen Cohen?

  How, yeah, how often are you, exactly. How often are you doing it? Every day?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  No, uh-uh. So a couple of times a week, you know, here's the thing. So I travel like about 75% of the time. I'm not traveling with a rucking vest.

• 37:22Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  She was like, I'm not gonna do it. So, you know, if I'm home and meeting a friend for a walk. So I have a girlfriend that I walk with and she's about 5'2". I'm 6 feet. Clearly I gotta do something here, otherwise, you know, so even though she's a fast one, I throw a rucking vest on. So, you know.

• 37:41Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  That's what I will do.

• 37:43Jen Cohen?

  That makes sense. Okay, so basically, nothing you've said was, has been that outrageous.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Nothing outrageous. It's almost stuff. The basics work the best.

• 37:53Jen Cohen?

  The basic, that was how we began this podcast. Like, the basics do work the best, even though people want to find these magic.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  I know, they want a trendy formula. I keep trying to think of a formula. Here's my, here's my overall formula, though. The first thing you do is make sure you're getting in 8,000 steps a day, at least, bare minimum. That is like, that is like flossing your teeth. Once you have that dialed, and ideally a couple of times, you know, that's just throughout the day. You're moving all throughout the day. You're standing instead of sitting, you're walking instead of standing. Throw a rucking vest in where you can, add a little intensity where you can, all that. Then, you add in resistance training. And you train to get better at life. So you do things that mimic normal life. In life, you have to get off the toilet, so you're squatting. You're picking up groceries, you're doing deadlifts. You know, you do the stuff, right?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Then you add in some high-intensity interval training to improve your VO2 max. And then, one day a week, you throw in a yoga class. So you get your balance and flexibility. That's it. That's the formula.

• 38:50Jen Cohen?

  I love that.

• 38:58Jen Cohen?

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• 39:39Jen Cohen?

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• 40:25Jen Cohen?

  I wanted to ask you about GLP-1s. They're a huge topic, as I'm sure you know.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Oh, honey, you did not see the, the, um, it was all over. Everyone's going, this is going viral. So at Unamonia, they had a GLP-1 panel.

• 40:40Jen Cohen?

  Oh, they did. Okay.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So it was this Tufts Nutrition researcher. I don't remember his name. I just remember Dariush, but I don't remember the last name. It started with an M. Then they had Zachary Knight, who was a neuroscientist. I was in the middle. Then they had Callie Means. Then they had Julian Michaels. And my belief on these, first of all, I don't believe that you lose weight to get healthy. I believe you have to get metabolically healthy in order to put on muscle and burn fat. We are in a metabolic health crisis, as we know, like less than, I think it's probably less than 5% of the population now is metabolically healthy. I mean, the fact that we are almost at 80% overweight and obese and that we have a very

• 41:22Speaker 02

  high amount of people who are normal weight, that are normal weight obese, it's absolutely frightening, right? For the first time, the obesity trend lines are starting to, to normalize where they've been exponentially increasing and it's because of these. The issue with the GLP-1s, I think they're the greatest longevity peptide and they're being used completely inappropriately for, for what we could do with them. You know, the, you know, the pharmaceutical companies have jacked these prices. If we could just compound them in small micro doses, they, they actually can heal your metabolism. And when you've got someone who's in a metabolic hole, trying to pull them out of it just with diet and exercise, I mean, we would all love this. Here's the thing. What would we like?

• 42:04Speaker 02

  If everyone could eat healthy, exercise, get great sleep, manage your stress and have great relationships and believe in something bigger than them, that would be so great, wouldn't it? But when you're in a metabolic hole that you can't climb out of, all of that looks impossible. And you're hurt, you're inflamed, you can't move more. I mean, I'm working with a guy who's 385 pounds, now 350, and, you know, he was getting 2,500 steps in a day because everything hurt. And he wouldn't go on these because of all the BS, shame, misinformation out there about them. Like, it is so ridiculous to me. It pisses me off. So this whole thing over here was Callie and Gillian screaming, basically called me a liar and told me I was full of, I don't know if I can swear on this.

• 42:49Jen Cohen?

  You can swear on my thing, you can.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Right? Shit, called out the other scientists who were like the sweetest guys ever. I'm like, you know, game on. I go, I have all the studies for anything I'm saying here, I've got the research. But I first got interested in them because my son's got a traumatic brain injury. And I saw, I was at a lecture and the doctor who'd been using him for a decade started talking about neuroregeneration. And I'm like, are you kidding? And my son, it has changed his life, changed his life. Like, you know, whatever I have to do to continue to get this from him, he's on semaglutide, compounded, small dose. And, you know, this was a kid who was like, they did a brain scan, a neuroquant, and it's like 75% brain loss from, you know, the second injury over the course of a year.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Like, he was going down and dying. And this has pulled him out. And guess what? He's happy. So we know, like, they help with inflammation, they help improve

• 43:44Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  sensitivity, they help with microvascular dilation, they reduce blood pressure, they improve lipid profiles, they are neuroregenerative and cardio regenerative, like, all these things. And there's all this BS out there, and a lot of it's because they're being dosed totally crazy. But then you have people out there screaming and yelling that we just need to eat better and exercise well. And clearly, we do, but that's not going to save the planet at this point.

• 44:10Jen Cohen?

  Right. Exactly. You know, it's funny. I know, you know, Dr. Tina Moore, I'm sure you've talked to her. I've talked to her.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I love Tina so much.

• 44:17Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, she's great.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you guys were just together. She told me.

• 44:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  You saved her with the.

• 44:22Jen Cohen?

  With the Instagram. I know. And she's telling everyone that. That's so funny. And I find it interesting because, you know, like everything, politic, everyone is so divisive. Like, God forbid you don't agree with somebody. You get like, you get like canceled or shut down. And, you know, it's interesting because people in the fitness realm I've seen get very, very angry, right, about this, right? And I, and I feel like to your point, like if it helps somebody, it also if it jumpstarts you.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  It pulls you out of the hole.

• 44:52Jen Cohen?

  Right. If it's a jumpstarter and not, and it gets you to a place where it can get you, get you to at least to 10% along the way, what is, people are just going crazy and, and, and being very, very vicious, vicious for it. I think the problem is also it is expensive and the concern is what happens when you're not on it? Do you rebound? Do you gain all the weight back? Do you go right back to all the inflammation? Like, like, is it something like where we could, where is it, where it is a microdose? I think that's the problem.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Here's the issue. If you have fatty liver, 30% of the population now does, most don't know they have it. If you have insulin resistance, if you're obese, you have a GLP-1 deficiency. Now, we don't know if you also have resistance because a lot of times with hormones, you get resistance as well, like insulin resistance. But let's say you're, you have a GLP-1 deficiency. So we can start to do the things to help your body produce it, right? Like improve your L cells, things like acromantia, you've probably heard of that. Things that help slow down the breakdown of this, there's this DPP4 enzyme that breaks it down. So we could slow it down. We can help with production of it. However, some of these people may never have it come back online.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  It doesn't need to be expensive. When you look at the compounded versions, it could be $50 a month. For a lot of these people, they're on poly pharmacy. They're spending more on their high blood pressure, their lipid lowering. Drugs. And if they went on this, they would, and they'd, they'd eat less, right? So if they went on these things, low dose, a microdose is usually about a fifth of the dose. You may have to go up to the starting dose, but then you could back down. But here's what needs to happen. If it could be the case that if you wanted to use one of these, you had to go in and get your body composition tested and be consistent with checking your body composition, because it doesn't cause muscle loss. Caloric restriction causes muscle loss. Any diet poorly designed causes a 20 to 30% loss in skeletal muscle.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  That is the diet. It's not the drug. The drug actually doesn't cause muscle loss. It doesn't. In fact, you can gain muscle on the drug. So that's BS.

• 47:04Jen Cohen?

  But that's the thing that a lot of people are talking about, right?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Not true. It's the diet. It's the diet. So if you are any diet that does not have optimal protein and you're not doing resistance training, you'll lose skeletal muscle if you're doing caloric restriction. That's the way that works. So if you are eating correctly, getting that protein and maybe supplementing with essential amino acids, if you're too low in protein. If you're doing your resistance training, which first you just start with getting the person to move, because a lot of these people are, the average person's walking 3,000 steps a day, 3,000. So really, if we just got them to walk to 8,000, if we started to get some air squats in, you know, we just get them moving. And, you know, working with people who are morbidly obese, we oftentimes have to have an air squat over, say, a couch arm because it just hurts so much. So we got to get the inflammation down.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Then you start to improve the diet, right? You get them moving more, you get them sleeping. They might need to do some sleep therapy because a lot of times when you're obese, you don't sleep well. Then you start, you can taper it. Will they have to be on it for life? They might have to cycle it for life, low dose. But I contend that that would be better than living a life of obesity on medications.

• 48:11Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, I agree. I think the problem is people are abusing it. I think people who don't need it are, are taking it. I think like a lot of fitness influencers are taking it.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  What are they taking it for? Are they taking it because they had issues?

• 48:24Jen Cohen?

  Vanity reasons. Vanity reasons.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Other, I mean, yes, you could use it for vanity reasons. However, You could also use it for inflammation. You could use it for ApoB. Like, my husband's on a teensy cycling dose. And these cycling doses are not meant to take your appetite away, right?

• 48:41Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Surely the lowers ApoB that was that was chronically elevated. We tried everything, couldn't get it to go. Same with my son is is using it for his brain. So you can use low doses of these, not for body composition, but for inflammation, for insulin sensitizing, for neuroregeneration, for microvascular dilation. There's other things they do. And there's a whole host. Like, if you go to Consensus and ChatGPT and plug in benefits of GLP-1 agonist, it's kind of mind blowing, overwhelming. And that's a PubMed, you know, thing, so.

• 49:16Jen Cohen?

  But what about the side effects? Like.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Well, the side effects when you're low dosing are not an issue.

• 49:21Jen Cohen?

  So it's only when you're taking a big dose is that?

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, like you should, they start, the dose they start people with is ridiculous. Like, it's way higher than it should ever be.

• 49:30Jen Cohen?

  Do you have to down, but does, does your body get acclimated to whatever dose you're taking? So when you, what does a cycle mean? Give us examples.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  So let's say I am not a physician. I don't play one on podcasts. If I were, if I were working with someone who I could work with a physician, who would get compounded pharmacy, you know, trezepatide or semaglutide, I would start with about a fifth of the starting dose. And I would start super low with that in combination with, they have to track their food. They have to make sure they're getting in their protein, one gram per pound of target body weight. And then we're going to start to move. And then we see how they do. And then we get them, you know, we'll see if we have to raise it or not. And then if we do have to raise it, you just continue to do all the other stuff. So hopefully you can start to take it down. And then cycling might be once every two weeks, once every three weeks, once every month.

• 50:22Jen Cohen?

  Hmm, okay. That makes sense, actually. Do you take it or no?

• 50:27Speaker 02

  I take a teensy bit of it. Now, here's what's interesting. I tracked everything with this because I have a weird autoimmune thing that everyone's small. Remember I talked about how my weight went up?

• 50:38Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  This weird little autoimmune thing that every once in a while will trigger. And I'm like, what the heck is that? And so I was 144 pounds and like 11, 12%. I think it was 11% body fat when I did it. And I went on and the person who initially put me on it, put me on a starting dose. It was too much. It was way too much. And so that dropped me like I like, and it was funny. Here's what's weird. I was actually tracking my calories and I didn't change what I was doing or eating by more than 200 calories. But I went down to 138. And so I popped the dose way down and started cycling it. So basically a fifth of the dose once or twice a month. Right?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  And it came back, back up to my normal weight, normal body fat. And so it's, it's one you just have to watch. And, but I use the teensiest dose every once in a while.

• 51:35Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  All that, all the autoimmune stuff, maybe because there's good research on that.

• 51:39Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right, right. So we, I want to just end with one other question and we can just wrap it. But let's talk about a couple, like a few or as many as you want, but some popular habits that people do that are actually detrimental. That are, that they think are good for them.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  OMAD.

• 51:57Jen Cohen?

  OMAD?

• 51:59Speaker 02

  One meal a day.

• 52:00Jen Cohen?

  Oh, who's doing that? Oh, is this like intermittent fasters, you mean?

• 52:05Speaker 02

  Well, you know, fasting's, fasting's kind of such a tough word because what's it really mean? It could mean anything from normal eating, like stop eating three hours before bed. Eat about an hour or two after waking up in the morning. That's like to me what we should be doing. Get that, you know, 10 to 12 hour window. It could be eating, compressing that a little bit. And there's some, you know, benefits for that. Some of it might be caloric restriction, but some of it's, it's hard to say like I, I don't know when autophagy starts. I don't know how you test for it. I don't know how anybody knows this. I don't, you know, I don't know why we'd all be the same. It would seem like it would have to be with your metabolic health, but I think there's some benefits to these things. But I also think there's some detriments to it. So that's one that I do not, I don't like is OMAD.

• 52:49Jen Cohen?

  I love that you call it that. While we're on that habit, you know, I find that for women, it's very for hormonal reasons, women are not getting the same benefits from fasting or intermittent fasting as I see some, you know, my male friends or my male counterparts get, you know?

• 53:04Speaker 02

  We, you know, we just, we are complex machines. Like, you know, they are like the VW, remember growing up, everyone who had a VW bug, you could literally go in there with like a bobby pin and fix it.

• 53:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Versus.

• 53:20Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's just we're complicated and, and, and you mess with us a little bit, it throws all of our hormones off, whether it's fasting, keto, any of these types of things can be wonky for us. I'm not a fan of keto for women unless, now, diets are tools. So, you know, if you've got cancer, fasting and keto would be a different situation, right? So, you know, I'm not talking about that. I'm looking at powerful aging and looking at that. So again, you always have to look at it because I'll get asked about all these different diets and go, they're tools. What are you trying to accomplish? And realize you might use a tool short term. It doesn't mean that that's going to be that that diet that's going to heal this issue right now is the diet you need to stay on forever.

• 54:06Jen Cohen?

  What is your idea? Okay. So give me another popular habit that people are doing that's actually detrimental.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Hmm. I don't know. Like, what are the other things that they're doing that are not healthy?

• 54:16Jen Cohen?

  Hmm. Lots of things.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  I don't know. Putting too much fat in everything.

• 54:22Jen Cohen?

  Like butter and coffee type of thing?

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Like just especially for women, like, you know, easy to overload your calories with a lot of this fat. I, I remember, um, as I first started to really track food and I just did an interview with Will Lee and, you know, talking about olive oil and I'm like, ah, you know, and then I started to really track. I was like, wow, I think I put a half a cup of olive oil on my salad.

• 54:44Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  It adds up, you know? Too much healthy food's unhealthy. It's got to go somewhere. I always think it's funny with keto because people are like, I'm doing a ketogenic diet to burn fat. I'm like, well, are you burning dietary fat or body fat?

• 54:58Jen Cohen?

  100%. I think the problem is a big myth is how many calories, we over index how many calories we're actually burning. And so we think, oh, we can eat that piece of cake, or we can do that because we went to the gym for 45 minutes. But we actually only work, we only like burn a third, I think it was, what we actually think we do.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't take out your resting metabolic rate. Here's, you know, and you can't, don't look at your body like that. It's, yes, there, in a way, it is a bank account, but it's much more of a chemistry lab, and we can't ever look at, and I used to do this way back in the day. I remember like going and eating a bunch of crap and then sitting on like, you know, the exercise bike at the gym for hours as if this was going to work this way.

• 55:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  It does not work that way.

• 55:43Jen Cohen?

  It does not work that way.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Right. But if you're looking at the treadmill, it says calories burned, it didn't subtract out your resting metabolic rate. How many calories you would have burned if you just didn't do anything.

• 55:54Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  So the biggest way, actually, this is really interesting. So we have our metabolism, we have our resting metabolic rate, we have the thermic effect of food, and then we have activity. And in activity, we have exercise and we have non-exercise, right? The biggest needle mover for us, I mean, for our resting metabolic rate, really, the only way we can shift that is to put more muscle on our body. For our overall metabolism, the biggest needle mover is really that non-exercise activity. It's how much you're moving all throughout the day. And one of the studies, like I'm thinking, I mean, there's been multiple studies of this that show in overfeeding situations, people move more, and in underfeeding situations, people move less. Like, our body strives for

• 56:36Speaker 02

  homeostasis. And so if you can start to really track, and I've become a little like, I like to focus on something to really lock it in. And so I've been really focusing on steps and making sure I'm moving all throughout the day. And I love the research. I don't know if you've seen the research on Vipon exercise snacks.

• 56:54Jen Cohen?

  I just see it.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  So they did a study where they showed people and they looked at two groups versus nothing. So one group, no exercise snacks. And these are short, one to two minute, really high intensity things, like I was talking about when we started. And so one group did 4.4 minutes of exercise snacks a day. It would be like doing, you know, two to three circuits. One group did 10 minutes of exercise snacks a day. The group that did 10 minutes lowered their all-cause mortality by 40% and their risk of cancer and heart disease by 50%. And the group that did 4.4 minutes lowered it by 28%. And we also know that if you did 30 air squats, you actually will, will lower your blood

• 57:35Speaker 02

  sugar response, or no, if you did 10 air squats every hour for eight hours, 8.5 hours, you will have the same blood sugar control or better than if you did a 30-minute walk. So I think that one of these really important things for us to start to think about is how do we get more, more vigorous movement, run up the stairs, do the air squats, do the squat jumps all throughout the day?

• 58:00Jen Cohen?

  No, I could not agree with you more on that. I mean, I always tell, I always say that I would prefer to do three 10-minute workouts a day versus a long, strenuous one because it's about how much you're moving your body during the day. It's not because most people go to the gym and then after the gym, they're like sedentary for the next 23 and a half hours. Not the smartest thing.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Well, the research also showed, I remember early on, this was in graduate school, there was a study that came out that looked at people that were instructed to do three 10-minute sessions of cardio a day versus one 30-minute session. And they compared the two groups and the 10-minute session had way better cardiovascular effects because of it. And their whole hypothesis was that it was because you either did, you know, you either did 30 minutes or you didn't do it all versus you could do maybe one 10-minute one. But I also think if I know I only have 10 minutes, I'm going to work a lot harder than if I'm going to push myself through an hour. Like then you pace yourself.

• 58:59Jen Cohen?

  That's true. That's 100% true too, right? Because you're like, I'm only doing this for 10 minutes. I might as well put all, you know, let's do it. No, that's a good point. Okay, JJ, I've had you for a long time on this show. I appreciate, after all the technical difficulties, I appreciate you coming on. Tell people how they can find out more about you, where they find you, besides the Shiitine, which I-

• 59:20Speaker 02

  The Shiitine that I'm sending you.

• 59:22Jen Cohen?

  Yes.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Send me your address.

• 59:24Jen Cohen?

  I'm going to. I'm going to send it to you now.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So, very fun stuff. I'll give you a couple websites. But jjvirgin.com is where everything is. And that's where, like, I have my Well Beyond 40 podcast. I created two different challenges. One is our Eat Protein First Challenge that takes you for a week of really figuring out how much protein you need and making sure. I have people eat their protein first so they get it in, because I heard from too many women. I can't, I'm too full. I'm like, well, eat it first.

• 59:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Then you got, and you have to use a food scale and you have to use a bio or a little chronometer app. So I use a food scale and an app to make sure that you got it. So that is jjvirgin.com/proteinfirst. And then I just launched at Udemonia a snack challenge. So it's 10 minutes, 10 days, 10 minutes to win it, a snack challenge, where I take them through the things that they can do for 10 days. Because I figure if you do it for 10 days, like, I don't believe that it's 21 days to do a habit. Like, where'd that urban legend come from? Like, just get used to doing it and be amazed how you feel. So that one's jjvirgin.com/snackchallenge. But again, I'm like-

• 1:00:36Jen Cohen?

  I love that.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  What are these simple, actionable things that we can do that will make, they'll move the needle, right? They'll make a big-

• 1:00:44Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. I love that. I'm going to actually, I'm looking for your information. I can't, you're going to have to give it to me after. I don't know why it's not in here. But I sent you my address. Thank you again. And I think we're going to do this again for you right now. So I'll see you soon.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  We are. Well, we're going to do our business one.

• 1:00:59Jen Cohen?

  Yes, that's fine. Either one. Okay, so, bye.