Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / “Boundaries Are Your Best Biohack” — JJ Virgin on Women’s Health, Power, and Navigating a Male-Dominated Industry

Transcript

“Boundaries Are Your Best Biohack” — JJ Virgin on Women’s Health, Power, and Navigating a Male-Dominated Industry · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  What does it really mean to be a powerful woman?
• 0:05
  Especially when your body, your health, and your identity are constantly evolving.
• 0:11
  Welcome back to Everyday Incessial. The podcast where we explore how ancient wisdom meets
• 0:15
  modern living through food, health, and human connection. I'm your host, James Berry.
• 0:22
  Today's guest, JJ Virgin, joins us to share hard-earned wisdom from training celebrities,
• 0:29
  navigating personal tragedy, and busting health myths that keep women stuck. We talk
• 0:37
  midlife mustos, nutrition fads versus ancestral truths, and while listening to your body might be
• 0:45
  the most radical thing you can do, please enjoy JJ Virgin.
• 1:15
  The first person I worked for always had a male trainer. They had a female nutritionist and a
• 1:18
  male trainer, but here were a very strong female in a very male dominated industry. What was that
• 1:25
  like? Never noticed. You know, it's so funny is the reality is when I started personal training,
• 1:31
  there weren't personal trainers. There were coaches, and it was me as far as I know, like Mark
• 1:37
  Sisson, Body by Jake, and Tony Horton. What was crazy back then is I would take my clients on field
• 1:45
  trips down to Gold's Gym, they didn't have trainers. Anyone could come in, you know, and there were
• 1:51
  just a couple of us, then all of a sudden they exploded and became a thing. I love where it is,
• 1:57
  and honestly, I think females are actually better suited to be trainers than men. That's my opinion.
• 2:03
  Here's the reality, especially for men, we're better suited. We can get away with stuff with
• 2:09
  those guys. They'll do stuff for us they wouldn't necessarily do for a male trainer. I mean,
• 2:13
  it's the truth, right? It's reality. It's really true. They don't want to look like a wimp in front
• 2:18
  of a gal, you know, especially if I've just gone and picked up the weights that I'm going to have
• 2:23
  them lift and handed it into them. It's such a good point. Was there ever an issue of like,
• 2:30
  here you were a young woman, you know, you're trying to make money. Was there ever an issue of like,
• 2:34
  drawing boundaries or just, of course. However, I think it's also how you set things up. You know,
• 2:41
  I did not wear overtly sexual clothing. I didn't set up anything to be flirty like none of that
• 2:48
  ever happened. And the reality is, in all the years of training, I'm thinking of three times
• 2:56
  that I got hit on. And it was even those times, it was very easy to shut it down quickly.
• 3:02
  That's super impressive. Given that so many women, like the whole Me Too movement was about how
• 3:08
  before that women were feeling like, oh, I have to do this to get ahead, right? That was kind
• 3:13
  of this unspoken reality. So super impressive. You had boundaries then. Well, who knows where I
• 3:18
  would be if I like didn't have boundaries? Okay, here's a crazy story I've never told before.
• 3:23
  I was going into a little coffee shop in Brentwood, California on a, I don't know,
• 3:28
  Saturday morning, Sunday morning, getting an Americano. And this man came out afterwards and
• 3:35
  asked me if I was a model like those lame things she'd asked all the time when you're six feet tall.
• 3:40
  And I said, no. And he goes, well, would you like to be because I've got a leather Italian leather
• 3:46
  line and we're booking new models and it pays X amount. Well, maybe. And he goes, meet me up at the,
• 3:55
  I forget where it was like Hotel Belair. We'll talk about it. I'm like, okay. So I go up there.
• 4:00
  Okay. So here's the wildest thing. Now I already am thinking this is absolutely BS, but let's hear
• 4:06
  him out. I'm safe. I'm in a public place. It'll be fine. So I sit down and the guys got three envelopes.
• 4:13
  The first card, he said, you know, open the cards up. And the first card was, you know,
• 4:17
  you have to kiss a bunch of frogs to find your hands and prints. I don't remember what the second
• 4:22
  card was. And I'm like, look at this dude. And he goes, so how much? And now remember, I may
• 4:28
  undergrad at UCLA at the time. I am working five jobs. I have a scholarship to UCLA, but I'm also
• 4:34
  working all these jobs. I'm running an aerobic studio. I'm personal, trying all this stuff, right?
• 4:39
  And, you know, I'm making good money for me in the 80s, but still. He goes, well, how much would
• 4:46
  you need? Like what would be your dream amount of money to make each month? And here's what's
• 4:51
  funny. I was like, wow, $15,000. I thought this was an enormous sum, right? And he goes, open the
• 4:57
  last envelope. And the last envelope was really thick. And the last envelope was hundreds. It was
• 5:03
  just hundreds and hundreds. And he's like, that's $15,000. I don't know if it was because I didn't
• 5:07
  count it. I just looked at him. And he proceeded to tell me that he would set me up in a condo. He
• 5:13
  get me a Jaguar. I'd have a black American Express card. Blah, blah, blah. I'm looking at him.
• 5:17
  Like I'm like, do you know it's so funny? I say this to him. I go, you probably picked the one
• 5:21
  gal in LA who's going to turn this one down. Like they're all around you. You know, why would you
• 5:27
  pick me? There is some crazy stories from that kind of stuff. I knew a woman where a famous writer
• 5:34
  was doing that, but not sexual at all, but they were paying for all these bills just to support her
• 5:40
  and trying to make her. I mean, there was just some crazy stuff that went down. So I'm blown away
• 5:44
  that you navigated that just with these strong boundaries. It's such a young age. It's just so
• 5:50
  rare. I don't have great boundaries in all areas, I will say. But I always had a boundary there
• 5:55
  because here's my thought process. I thought the minute you cross that boundary, you're done.
• 6:00
  You just destroyed the probably most precious thing out there. Like, you know, you just destroyed
• 6:06
  your chance of ever having a real, a real relationship. It just didn't work for me. Now other people
• 6:11
  may be able to do that and jump on into other things and be fine, but I knew for me I wouldn't.
• 6:15
  Now you just mentioned you do struggle with some boundaries. Where do you struggle there?
• 6:20
  Don't we all struggle with some boundaries? Yeah, but I'm so curious because you seem. I mean,
• 6:24
  I think to the person who meets you, they're like, gosh, Jesus, got it together. She's physically
• 6:29
  strong. She's a strong person. She's go get her, go give her. No one has it together. Everyone has
• 6:34
  their stuff. What you would think looking at me is that I am the most disciplined mother on the
• 6:40
  planet. Also a very disciplined dog owner. No, those two totally suck at your room by your dog.
• 6:48
  And it's funny. I keep thinking about, you know, Tim and I raised kids together. It would have been
• 6:53
  kind of pathetic because both of us like the dog will go poop on the carpet. You know, my son
• 6:58
  Bryce is absolutely fantastic about punishing her and getting her to stop doing that. We're both like,
• 7:02
  oh, it's okay. Okay, that's super fun. Going back to the training though, so you've trained
• 7:10
  some of the most high-performance celebrities out there. What have you learned though about
• 7:14
  discipline, mindset, and health that most everyday women are overlooking?
• 7:21
  So it's interesting when you train celebrities is they have to do this for their career.
• 7:26
  Like I trained a lot of news anchors and then celebrities, I get them ready for different
• 7:31
  films. And when it's your career, you take it like it's a job. Think if we all approached our health
• 7:37
  as if it was our number one job because it should be, right? I mean, how different would things be?
• 7:43
  And I'll tell you the other interesting group that I trained, you know, I started doing training
• 7:48
  and nutrition because it was like one without the other didn't really work. So that meant more
• 7:52
  school. But what I really saw was the men. So I had pretty much a 50-50 split of men and women
• 7:59
  clients. And the men were really easy. You told the men what to do. The men got their support team
• 8:07
  around them to create all the stuff so that their schedule was set up correctly for them for their
• 8:12
  training. If they're supposed to be a massage therapist, they were coming over. Their food was
• 8:16
  correct. Everything was set up for them. And they just showed up to do the work. The women,
• 8:22
  not the case. They put themselves last. They put everything else in front of that. They didn't
• 8:26
  prioritize this. You know, it was like, oh my gosh. Come on. Just that little thing that you look
• 8:33
  at and you go, women, you need to stop putting yourself last on the list. Put yourself at the top
• 8:39
  of the list. That whole auction mask on you first is true. No one listens to it. But you got to do
• 8:44
  it. The reality is, if you want to be a great mom role model, guess what? They're watching you.
• 8:51
  So if they're watching you not take care of yourself, they're not going to take care of themselves.
• 8:56
  It's such a good point. I have to wonder if that is why we're seeing that kind of boomering
• 9:01
  effect right now because it feels like so many of the topics right now are about not only women
• 9:06
  empowerment, but women's health. Like we're seeing a lot about menopause. I see it all over social
• 9:12
  media now and I never used to see it. Well, it might be what you're following. I see palm
• 9:16
  cheese and chihuahua's all over. So it's probably my age as to it. Here's what's interesting.
• 9:22
  Women can put themselves second or third or fourth or probably tenth if they're even on the list
• 9:27
  for years and years and years and years and years until they start to get into
• 9:31
  parry menopause and they can even blow it off for a while into parry menopause until it takes
• 9:36
  them down. And that's what you're finally seeing is we have a big margin for error until we get
• 9:42
  to there. And the reality is the more you drive yourself, the harder you are on yourself,
• 9:48
  the faster you're going to get into parry menopause. You can trigger that thing early if you're not
• 9:52
  careful. So I think the reason you're seeing so much of it is it's just something that makes you
• 9:57
  stop and pause and go, all right, I'm going to have to address this because I can't handle it.
• 10:03
  Whether it's the emotional side of it, the physical changes, the brain fog, I mean there's so
• 10:08
  many things that happened during this time and some people get all of them, some people get one
• 10:13
  of them, but it's pretty much impossible to ignore. I feel like though that what happens,
• 10:19
  I've talked about this before in the podcast is that really health is such a challenging thing for
• 10:24
  people to improve or make changes to. Like what they eat because we're so stuck in our ways and
• 10:30
  I find is that most people don't make changes unless they're sick or someone they love gets sick
• 10:34
  or dies. What would be three things that you wish every woman would start doing now before
• 10:40
  their symptoms that are screaming at them to make changes? Honestly, I think we got to reframe the
• 10:46
  question. I had a great nutrition mentor early on who said, ad before you take away, I think when
• 10:51
  the biggest mistakes was thinking nutrition is taking away before we're adding. And then I love
• 10:56
  Tim Ferriss's question of like, what if it were easy? What if it were easy? What if we looked at
• 11:00
  things that we could start to put into our daily life? What if we added before we started taking away?
• 11:06
  And with women, I think the most important thing with women is to ditch the traditional scale because
• 11:11
  it has destroyed us. It has totally ruined our whole mental health metabolic health and metabolism
• 11:18
  because it's made us track the wrong metric for success. If I want to lose a lot of weight,
• 11:23
  what I need to do is stop all resistance training. I need to just kind of run around as much as
• 11:28
  possible and starve myself. And I will drop muscle like nobody's business. And I'll be a soft,
• 11:33
  flabby, unhealthy, sarcopenic, frail human. And that's what the scale would tell you to do.
• 11:39
  So the first thing we need to do in terms of women is really track what matters. And the reality is
• 11:46
  you can't do that with a traditional scale. You have to get a biome pedant scale. I'm checking out
• 11:50
  right now because apparently now you can even do it with your phone and some measurements. But we're
• 11:56
  really trying to get to is how much of your body is fat-free mass. That's everything but fat.
• 12:02
  And to focus actually on proving that before you even start to worry about losing fat,
• 12:07
  we were taught the exact opposite in grad school. In grad school, I was literally taught,
• 12:12
  do not have someone lose weight, lift weights, until they lose the weight. Can you imagine that?
• 12:17
  Do not have someone lift weights until they lose the weight. No one would ever lift weights.
• 12:21
  You saw it happen on the biggest loser. If you focus on losing lots of weight,
• 12:27
  you're going to create metabolic adaptation. It's going to happen where you start to burn
• 12:31
  less calories than you should at the weight that you are. So you've got to focus first on building
• 12:36
  that muscle that will improve your insulin sensitivity, that will give carbohydrate to place
• 12:40
  to land. It's a sugar sponge that will start to support a better metabolism. It's actually going
• 12:45
  to help you lose fat, especially if you then do the second thing, which is eat to support the
• 12:50
  muscles. So eat protein first, eat carbohydrates that are rich in fibers and whole. If you eat to
• 12:56
  support your muscles, a whole lot of shift happens without you even trying. That's really good advice.
• 13:02
  I mean, it feels like what's happening is that there's a lot of confusion. There's almost too much
• 13:08
  information out there now and that people don't know where to start. For the person that is feeling
• 13:14
  kind of stuck, is there just kind of even one thing that you would recommend they do just to kind of
• 13:20
  start shifting whether it's mindset or their body or anything of that sort to just start down
• 13:27
  this path? I think it always has to start with your mindset. I think that's the single most
• 13:32
  important thing. I was doing a talk and someone in the audience said, how do we avoid the rebound
• 13:39
  weight game? If you look at the average diet out there, 95% recidivism rate in within five years,
• 13:45
  how do we avoid that? I said, the way you avoid it is to find fitter friends. I actually put that
• 13:51
  out online and got attacked. You're telling me to dump my friends. I didn't say that. What I
• 13:56
  said is get around some people who will challenge you, who live a fitness lifestyle because if you're
• 14:02
  hanging out with me, we're not staying out till one in the morning. I go to bed at 9 or 10. I get
• 14:08
  up early. I'm going to work out. We're going to eat healthy. It's not a thing. It's not even an
• 14:13
  issue. You wouldn't have an issue being with me because you just be living healthy. What the research
• 14:19
  shows is that just like that Jim Rohn quote of, you are the average income of the five people you
• 14:24
  hang out with, you're actually the average body composition of the five people you hang out with.
• 14:30
  Even if they're across the country and a best friend, we tend to be like those people we spend the
• 14:34
  most time with. I absolutely believe in that. What you're saying now, that's been my experience
• 14:39
  as well. I'm curious though, you are known for embracing cutting-edge science. But what do you think
• 14:46
  we've lost from ancestral wisdom that's essential to reclaim, especially for women?
• 14:52
  I love all the ancestral stuff. I like the bros stuff and I like the lab stuff and I think we
• 14:57
  all need to get along. I'm really irritated by what I'm seeing online where the lab scientists
• 15:02
  are attacking the health influencers. I'm looking at it and going, we need everybody. We do need to
• 15:07
  be careful if you're like just spouting off. Do some research. However, we need to have the lab
• 15:13
  science. Then we need to take that into the real world and try it. Sometimes the bros science,
• 15:17
  like the stuff I saw happening at Gold's Gym for decades, lends itself to then get studied. Everyone
• 15:23
  I think needs to get along. If you look back, one of the first things that happened in my nutrition
• 15:28
  career, that's just wild when I think about how fortuitous this was, is I ended up in a small room,
• 15:35
  there were maybe 12 of us with Dr. Lauren Cordain. For anyone that doesn't know, paleo diet
• 15:41
  father, basically, right? This was way before he wrote the book. This was actually I was working with
• 15:46
  designs for health and they paid him to do a lecture on paleolithic nutrition because they
• 15:53
  based their whole company on paleo principles. As I was listening to this, I'm like, oh my gosh,
• 15:58
  this makes so much sense. The challenge we have nowadays is we have two things that we are
• 16:04
  faced with that are so far beyond outside of ancestral nutrition that being circadian rhythm
• 16:10
  disruption. I mean like lights and tack, all the stuff. If you look at what's single most important
• 16:18
  thing, it's like get in touch with nature and light and grounding. We've totally screwed that
• 16:24
  thing up. I mean, some people live in a place where they never get the feet on the dirt.
• 16:28
  I try to go out every day and get my feet in the dirt and go walk. We were just out in Utah,
• 16:33
  like walking through all of the great forests hiking. How do you get out in nature more? I actually
• 16:39
  just saw a study James where they were looking at mental health and exercise and they saw
• 16:45
  an increase in mental health just by having people walk and look at nature videos. I'm like,
• 16:50
  why don't we just put them outside? Like let's just get them outside. So that's one piece and then
• 16:55
  of course the crazy toxins that we are getting hit with that are so far from anything our body was
• 17:02
  ever built to handle. So I think those two things have to be overcome and then we can kind of go
• 17:09
  back and go, all right, what would these principles of ven? There's so many simple things that you
• 17:15
  can take from that of just eating as close to nature as possible of feast and famine. You look at
• 17:23
  it and go, very unlikely we would have had regular meals every single day and all that stuff,
• 17:28
  which is why when people go, you can only eat this much protein. I'm like, I'm pretty sure when
• 17:32
  they killed an animal they ate as much as they could get in them. And that their body knew what to
• 17:37
  do with it. And recent protein studies showed exactly that. So how do we really get the toxin
• 17:44
  piece of things and the circadian rhythm piece of things fixed? Because I think those along with
• 17:48
  just the isolation of our modern world are our three biggest threats. How are you fixing them in
• 17:54
  your own life? Like are you being consistent about waking up at a certain time, you know, getting
• 17:59
  that early morning light? How are you doing it? We change time zones a lot, which is great. And what
• 18:06
  I found is that creatine saves me on time zone shifting, but I use lights as well. Caffeine,
• 18:13
  creatine. I'm playing around with some exogenous ketones right now with kinetics. And then light is
• 18:17
  what I use. So I'm a big person and it's interesting because my husband's kind of a vampire kind of a
• 18:23
  mole. He does not like bright lights. And the morning I'm like, I want to go outside and want the
• 18:26
  windows open. I want to see light. It's like, let's go. And I just have made a point. I've really
• 18:31
  learned how to time zone adjust well and use the light as my friend, creatine, and melatonin.
• 18:37
  So I use all of those things. And the toxin side of things, I am a huge sauna fan. I just was hearing
• 18:45
  something Dr. Ronda Patrick was reporting on about hot bass to being, you know, just or maybe more
• 18:51
  efficacious. The study didn't compare apples to oranges. So it was a hard study really paid attention
• 18:57
  to. But when I'm home, I saw in every single day and when I'm on the road, if I can get a bath
• 19:02
  tub, because hotels now seem to have gotten rid of their bath tubs, but when I can get one, I do
• 19:07
  that so that I can just continue detoxifying that way too. I think that we have to think about
• 19:12
  every single day, what are the things we can do to help our body eliminate toxins? Because no matter
• 19:18
  what kind of lifestyle you're created, obviously, you don't want to do silly things like drink out
• 19:22
  of plastic bottles. But still, we're going to get toxins everywhere. It's impossible, boy.
• 19:27
  I want to talk about creatine, but before we do, because we're kind of bringing up the whole
• 19:31
  science piece, how are you navigating the science? Because, you know, we've both been in this
• 19:36
  health field for long enough to see that it's very co-opted at times, right? It's manipulated to
• 19:42
  whoever's paying for its desired outcome. So how are you navigating that?
• 19:47
  Well, because we all have biases, right? I mean, everybody does. You know, the protein one is
• 19:52
  the craziest one, like the protein wars, the wars between, if you eat too much, it's going to hurt
• 19:58
  your longevity. If you don't eat enough, it's going to hurt your longevity. And then if you eat
• 20:01
  plant, it's going to be better, but if you eat animal, it's better. It's like, oh my gosh. I think
• 20:06
  that we've got to go to a couple different things. You've always got to go back to biochemistry,
• 20:13
  physiology, biology. Like, you got to go back to the science. I know they all want the double
• 20:18
  blind placebo controlled random blood. But those are really hard to do in certain cases. Like,
• 20:23
  it's really hard to do placebo controlled randomized double blinded exercise studies. How would
• 20:29
  you possibly do one? They know what they're doing. You know, I mean, it's like, there's some things
• 20:34
  you can do, but it's pretty darn hard. You know, I think we have to look at all these things and try
• 20:38
  to use our rational minds, the science that we already know in terms of our physiology and biology
• 20:46
  and biochemistry. And then, you know, look at these studies and then look in the real world. I
• 20:52
  remember in school, we would be taught stuff in grad school and I go, yeah, that's fine, but I'm
• 20:56
  in the real world and I that's not working. You know, that might work in this controlled setting
• 21:01
  here. But in the free living setting, this goes out the window. So that's the other piece, too,
• 21:08
  will it work? Yeah, it's like almost falling your own emotional intelligence around something.
• 21:12
  I remember like back in the day, a girlfriend I had, she was needing the pill at the time,
• 21:19
  but she was told to take the pill because that would be more natural for her than not taking the
• 21:24
  pill. And I just thought that was, huh? Yeah, exactly. Like our own emotional tells us like,
• 21:29
  that makes zero sense. I think you have to factor that in. I think that's a really good point.
• 21:34
  But let's now go to creatine. First of all, what is creatine for those that don't know and why
• 21:40
  is it such a hot topic right now? Creatine is a compound in your body that your body generally
• 21:46
  has about 120 to 140 grams of it makes about a gram a day from arginine, methionine, and glycine.
• 21:55
  And then ideally, you're getting another gram a day. And if you are under any kind of stress,
• 22:02
  training hard, have any kind of neuro issues, neurodegeneration, you want to go up from there.
• 22:10
  The research, the big argument in the field on creatine. So creatine comes from meat.
• 22:16
  In order to get that other gram a day, would take about a pound of raw or rare meter fish,
• 22:24
  or two pounds of cooked. Now for a carnivore, no problem. They got it. But for a lot of women,
• 22:31
  especially women who are trying to be more plant based, right? They're not getting it. They're not
• 22:35
  going to get it. Especially when you look at the average protein intake for a woman in the US,
• 22:40
  I think it's about 80 grams, but a lot of that comes from plant. So they're not getting what they
• 22:44
  need for creatine. This is especially problematic because women have less tissue stores than men
• 22:49
  because it's stored in your muscle. So we don't have as much muscle. We don't have as much tissue
• 22:54
  stores, like 20 to 30% less. What the current research, in fact, it's hot off the press. A new
• 23:00
  menopause study just came out showing what it did for brain fog. Here's the argument.
• 23:05
  Creatin monohydrate is the most steady form of creatine. So that's the one we should take.
• 23:10
  That is like saying rotary phones are the phone that we grew up with. That's the one we should use.
• 23:15
  You know, it's like it's just nonsensical thing. Don't we evolve and get better as we're learning
• 23:20
  things? It turns out that, you know, if you think of the math, we're supposed to take three to five
• 23:25
  grams of creatine monohydrate and we do it based on weight. And now they're having people take 10
• 23:30
  grams or 20 grams depending on trying to push more into the brain because your brain takes about
• 23:34
  5% of your creatine uptake. The rest is your body and preferentially it seems your body will take
• 23:39
  more of it if it's needing it. So in order to get it to brain you have to push harder.
• 23:43
  So if you need five grams of creatine or one gram of creatine rather, why do you need to take five?
• 23:51
  You need to take five because only about 15% of creatine monohydrate gets absorbed.
• 23:56
  Now the study I've been citing but I can't show you the publication yet but apparently it's two
• 24:02
  weeks away now showed that 76% of people who took creatine monohydrate experience some kind of
• 24:08
  like bloaty GI issues. And you'll see this fighting back and forth. No, no one has that. Yes,
• 24:12
  a lot of people have it. Here's what I just found from personal experience. I learned about
• 24:17
  creatine. I'm like, this is the greatest thing ever. Every woman should be on this world. You know,
• 24:20
  why did I ignore this for so many years? All the guys were on it when I was down at Gold's gym.
• 24:25
  I thought they all looked scary and so I wanted no part of it as I'm going through it. I go,
• 24:30
  boy, it was my head in the sand. So creatine helps you create more ATP. So it's going to help you
• 24:36
  create more energy in your brain and your body. It's good for your skin. It's good for your bones.
• 24:40
  I mean, like all sorts of stuff. Research coming out helps showing that it could help with bone.
• 24:45
  That's still iffy but a lot of the menopausal symptoms helps you work out harder,
• 24:51
  helps you recover better. I start selling creatine monohydrate. I get more blowback on that
• 24:57
  product than I've ever got. I've been 30 years in the supplement industry, mainly helping doctors
• 25:02
  put supplements in their practices. If there's a complaint, I hear it. I've never gotten pushback
• 25:07
  like I've gotten from people, even some of my friends and friends in the field were like, I'm
• 25:12
  not taking a gained weight. I don't feel good. And I'm like, oh, even my husband. So I'm like, okay.
• 25:19
  And I got some GI stuff when I was loading it. But I was like, yeah, okay, I'll work through it.
• 25:24
  You can't tell a woman to work through weight gain. They won't do it. You do hope that most of that
• 25:29
  is intramuscular. But in this situation, it's not. And that was the issue. So I was at a conference
• 25:37
  talking about creatine. And this formulator came up to me goes, I have a better creatine. And I was
• 25:43
  like, yeah, I've heard about the other creatines. It's marketing hype blah, blah, blah. But show me what
• 25:48
  you got. I'm always I want to be critically open-minded. I don't want to sound like another one of
• 25:52
  these people parroting. This is the only one you can use. I go to a manufacturing plant in the
• 25:58
  United States in Nebraska. And we learn all about it. Tim and I test it. I'm now taking way higher
• 26:06
  doses than before, like with no GI issues. Because I was cranking at my other one. But it was like, yeah,
• 26:12
  so. And I looked at that and went, this is how I can solve this problem for women. And that's where
• 26:17
  Tim came up with the name Shiateen. And it's not like, yeah, it's a great name. It's not like guys can't
• 26:22
  take the products. It's just like, I need women to stop being afraid of it. So I took creatine HCl,
• 26:29
  which is 85% absorbed as opposed to 15% absorbed. And I put it together with Torian and magnesium.
• 26:36
  Because when I was looking through the literature, I couldn't find a Torian magnesium creatine combo.
• 26:40
  But I found creatine and Torian and creatine and magnesium. And both of them had an exponential
• 26:45
  effect. They both helped in working out harder recovery, better recovery. So I'm like, these are
• 26:51
  two nutrients that people tend to be deficient in. And I created a formula that you could take 4x
• 26:56
  the foundational dose and be still right in range. So if someone wanted to load it for their brain.
• 27:03
  And then I started moving this product has exploded compared to anything I've ever done. You know,
• 27:08
  it just has exploded because people feel it. They feel it in their brain. They feel it in their
• 27:13
  body. It's, I use it for jet lag shifting. It's really super duper exciting. And this research project
• 27:20
  that just came out where they looked at, they looked at creatine HCl for brain fog. And they did
• 27:26
  four groups. It was a randomized placebo controlled blinded study, a high-quality study that there is.
• 27:32
  And what they did was they took a group and they gave them 750 milligrams of creatine HCl,
• 27:38
  which equals about 5 grams of monohydrate. They gave 1 group 1500. And then they gave 1 group
• 27:46
  a combined of HCl and ethyl ester. And then they gave 1 group nothing placebo. And what they found
• 27:53
  was both was 750 and 1500. They were getting the brain effects that you usually only see
• 28:00
  at higher doses of monohydrate, like 10 grams and 20 grams, which are causing some of those GI
• 28:06
  issues. So that is my creatine story. When I have this other study, I'm going to be blabbing it
• 28:12
  everywhere. I'm curious though, what is your opinion on at what cost? Like, because clearly we're
• 28:20
  talking about things that are isolates. They're not always natural. Is your opinion that if it works
• 28:26
  it works and it doesn't matter? Or where's the balance for you? So here's the thing. You can't
• 28:31
  do a natural creatine product. It would cost you gazillion dollars. So would your best thing be
• 28:39
  in a perfect world? This is kind of how I set my hierarchy of things. Perfect world.
• 28:43
  Get everything possible you can from your food. Food first. Always. Can you get enough vitamin D,
• 28:50
  three, and K2, not K1, but K2 from your food? I doubt it. I've only seen one person that doesn't
• 28:56
  need to take D3K2 in years of looking at labs. One that can get to the levels they need to be in
• 29:03
  their out in the sun all the time. And genetically they probably are blessed. I don't make vitamin D
• 29:08
  well. Magnesium. If you can get enough, do an RBC, magnesium, great. I rarely see someone getting
• 29:15
  enough magnesium. And omega-3s. I think that's one that if you really focus on fish and clean fish,
• 29:22
  great. But there's a lot of dirty fish out there. And so that's where I look at it and go,
• 29:28
  what are the things that we should be getting in nature? Like look back 500,000 years ago, we probably
• 29:33
  had great creatine levels in our body that we are not getting now. And if we can't get them,
• 29:40
  I wouldn't bother with creatine for a carnivore. But I don't know many female carnivores. And I
• 29:46
  also don't believe that the carnivore diet long term is I think it's a great elimination diet
• 29:51
  and a great healing diet. And then I think let's bring back in some polyphenols and fiber from
• 29:56
  plants. And I know that probably upsets all the carnivores who think plants are the scariest.
• 30:00
  Yeah, that is an interesting point though. It's like, so you've been in the industry long enough
• 30:05
  as well to just know, hey, these trends come and go. There's always someone trying to push an
• 30:10
  extreme for their brand, right? Because that's how you kind of stand out from the crowd is by
• 30:14
  picking, you know, something extreme or specific. Where have you found that, oh no, this is the truth.
• 30:22
  Like, I mean, I guess you kind of just shared it, the real food. But is there something out there
• 30:26
  that like you think people should almost unlearn because of all the chatter out there right now?
• 30:32
  If we're talking food specifically, I see diets as tools. And it's really about choosing the right
• 30:38
  tool for the job. What is going on right now? Quite often the diet that's going to heal you is not
• 30:45
  going to sustain you for the long haul. So everything needs to be designed based on you. I mean,
• 30:49
  we're in a really fun, interesting time where we can now have labs and we can look at body
• 30:54
  composition and we can look at your lifestyle and your preferences. I mean, you could design a
• 30:58
  fabulous diet for me, rich and kimchi. And I'll never eat it. Yeah. Like fermented foods,
• 31:04
  unless we're talking about wine, don't like them. Wine and chocolate are my fermented foods I like.
• 31:09
  Maybe some Greek yogurt. We've got to design diets that people will actually stick to for the long haul.
• 31:15
  I can tell you because I've written a bunch of diet books and everyone wants you to take an absolute.
• 31:19
  This is the thing. There's never a thing. There might be a thing right now and where you are in your
• 31:23
  life for some people. And for some people, I've put some clients on a carnivore diet because it
• 31:28
  was the perfect thing to get them to start to heal and get rid of their binge behavior because
• 31:34
  it's really hard to binge on steak. You just get full. You know, so I got some with a lot of
• 31:40
  trigger foods and food sense series. I'm like, let's just we'll just move on over to here. We're
• 31:44
  a little bit and get you over that. You were the one that really enlighten me on like even with
• 31:50
  pluck with the organmies. You're like, look, it's not a gateway to organmies because I don't want
• 31:53
  to eat organmies. I just want to have to eat organ meats. You know, it's like I told you I
• 31:59
  I have eaten organ meats once and it wasn't I wasn't supposed to eat organ meats. I was in London
• 32:04
  and someone gave me a steak and kidney pie bite. It was supposed to be the steak. It was the kidney.
• 32:09
  It was such a traumatic experience that I will never touch any of that again. But this
• 32:15
  pluck stuff and literally I'll tell you James when we first got it. I'm like, yeah, that's
• 32:20
  disgusting. And then Tim makes this killer chicken fries in the wonder of an air fryer that's a
• 32:26
  non toxic air fryer. And I'm obsessed with them. And I was like, what do you do? He goes, I use
• 32:31
  pluck. I want to talk about just the fact that so many people going back to so many people
• 32:36
  feel overwhelmed. But I think there's also a lot of like anxiety that's coming from people of like,
• 32:42
  I got to do it right or there's this person talking that. What kind of things out there? Can
• 32:47
  you kind of dispel or you know, even if it's one to two that you think like just don't even listen.
• 32:53
  Don't even go there because it's just going to cause anxiety and it's wrong. I love the fact that
• 33:00
  Brian Johnson is spending so much money and open sourcing everything he's doing only to come to
• 33:06
  the conclusion that diet exercise relationships and sleep make the biggest difference. Like,
• 33:11
  you know, and that there's a gal who is basically the sane side of all of this movement who's like,
• 33:19
  it's not consistent. I exercise. I do. She's got like, it's the best like slow age you're out there.
• 33:25
  And I think it's because she's not making it her job. Could you imagine like your whole life being
• 33:30
  what time you go to sleep and getting your perfect sleep score. And I literally had a friend do
• 33:33
  like, didn't want to go do something to mess up their sleep score. I go, isn't the whole point
• 33:37
  to make yourself resilient. So if you go out to a restaurant and happen to get some seed oils
• 33:41
  in your food, you don't just dissolve. And I know we're all in different places in our healing
• 33:45
  journey. And sometimes when you've had like big mold exposure or something, you've got to be really
• 33:50
  careful for a while. But our goal would to me is so that occasionally I could stay out late with
• 33:55
  friends and it's not going to take me out. And I might have some amazing wine. It's not going to
• 34:00
  take me out. And you know, it's like all the things you want to be able to do or conversely, you know,
• 34:05
  go to Park City and go do a really hard hike and altitude with people who live there and be able
• 34:11
  to pull that off too. You know, and stay right up with them. So I feel like we are majoring
• 34:19
  in the miners. And then everyone online is arguing about the miners. And I know the majors aren't
• 34:27
  sexy. But boy, if all we did was get people to eat clean quality protein, have great, you know,
• 34:36
  non-starchy vegetables and some fruit that are organic and clean and everything else.
• 34:42
  Most of the healthy fat you probably get out of your protein anyways. You really wouldn't need
• 34:46
  to worry much about it. You little olive oil was cooking. Got you to move every single day. Do
• 34:51
  something. Some of that being resistance training. Some being some, you know, hit for lactate.
• 34:55
  Just some moving every day. Hopefully outside and hopefully with friends. So you have a
• 34:59
  relationship and get your butt to sleep and make sleep a party. I mean, 90% of health problems
• 35:05
  would probably go away. And yet we're worried about which red lights. And hey, I love sauna and red
• 35:10
  light and all that stuff. But do the big things first. I just did a talk for a group and the woman
• 35:16
  wanted to know all the things she could buy. And I'm like, well, are you like eating your vegetables?
• 35:22
  Like, are you getting your walking meat in? Are you like, you know, the PMF mat, much as I love
• 35:27
  them, is not going to be more important than those things. Let's make a hierarchy.
• 35:32
  We really want to focus on the basics. And if there is someone that's like, okay, I've done that.
• 35:38
  What are the kind of tools you've mentioned a few in the episode? But what are the specific tools
• 35:43
  that maybe your top three that you would be like, you know, if you're ready for tech or these
• 35:48
  tools, like these are the three you should get. I get the asses, by the way, we're cooking,
• 35:52
  you know, like what three cooking things should you have in your kitchen? And it's like, I want to
• 35:56
  hear what you would have in your household, for example. Well, sauna for sure. Infrared or like
• 36:02
  Swedish or, you know, we have a fast heat relax sauna that goes to 180. And we have a sunlight
• 36:11
  infrared. What we're actually going to do is get a sauna space light and rig it into the
• 36:18
  sunlight and take that thing up to 180. So we're going to have the best of both worlds.
• 36:21
  I spend most of my time in the sunlight and Tim goes back and forth. The next thing is red lights.
• 36:27
  Now I am getting infrared in the red lights near and and far, but I also have a great red light
• 36:33
  panel. I have a Juve one. I have a sunlight one. And I'm a big red light fan. I'm using it for my
• 36:40
  eyes to help not get macular degeneration. I have a great, I don't know if you know Dr. Ronnie
• 36:45
  Bonic from Mindshare, but she's a menopause-focused eye specialist in New York City. So doing her
• 36:51
  protocol for that. Skin for collagen for healing helps reduce inflammation helps with muscle recovery.
• 36:58
  So I've been using a lot on I have a broken foot. And then that third thing I'm kind of obsessed
• 37:03
  with peptides. So I've been using a couple different peptides. I have been playing around with
• 37:08
  different types of GLP ones. I started playing around with them for my son for his traumatic brain
• 37:13
  injury. And he had some neurodegeneration that has turned it around, which is pretty
• 37:19
  flippin' amazing. And then we started playing around with it for Tim. And I mean mainly for my
• 37:23
  inflammation in osteoarthritis and autoimmune stuff. And Tim for his ApoB. So we've been seeing
• 37:29
  some results there, but we're low-dosing it. I'm still playing around with which one. Next up is
• 37:33
  retitude trutide. I'm not sure how to say it. Retitude trutide, I think. But I've been using
• 37:40
  truseptide. I use BPC157 and TB. Is it TB4 or TB5,000? One of the other. Yeah, that's one of the
• 37:49
  other. Yeah, I started just using that too. Yeah, so I use those. My son is using those as well.
• 37:55
  He's working with this amazing brain guy Spencer Zimmerman, who's helping him with all that.
• 38:01
  And then I also started this stuff called pentason poly sulfate that I learned about from Dr.
• 38:06
  Elizabeth Yurse that is used in vet medicine and used in Australia to basically kind of get people,
• 38:13
  80% of the time you'll all your OAS symptoms will basically get better and you improve your
• 38:19
  joint space. So I'm doing that. And just started playing around with testimonial and to see if it
• 38:24
  will help my deep sleep. Genetically, I'm not a good deep sleeper. So I'm always looking for an edge
• 38:29
  there. So those are the things that I've been playing around with. I can totally notice the
• 38:34
  difference when I don't take BPC and TB4, like I'm in warping the next day. So that's a definite
• 38:42
  indicator that is working. Yeah, it's definitely working. And then I take hormones of course,
• 38:46
  but I've been taking hormones for 15 years. Do you think every woman at a certain age to start
• 38:53
  looking at hormones? I think every woman has the right to make that decision. And I am glad that
• 39:00
  they're going to take some of those warning labels off of hormones. I was fortunate when all of
• 39:04
  this started to shift from me that all my friends were hormone docs way ahead of the curve, like
• 39:10
  back in, you know, back literally 15 years ago. So I've been on hormones since things, the first
• 39:16
  drop I went on. And that's to me when you should start to look at it, when you first start to feel
• 39:22
  things shift. Ideally, the better your lifestyle is, the better your diet is, the better your
• 39:26
  exercise is, the better sleep is, stress management, the more you can prolong it and the less you'll
• 39:31
  need. But I think, you know, as soon as you start to need them, don't delay. No need to suffer.
• 39:38
  Yeah. And I said women, but truth is, men can very much use it as well. Yeah. Tim's on testosterone.
• 39:43
  Yeah. Teeny bit of T3 thyroid. And his testosterone was down at 300. We've done some other things
• 39:51
  too alongside of testosterone therapy to get him. So he didn't need as much of the hormone.
• 39:58
  But, you know, it's like men with low testosterone, it's not the same as women because they don't
• 40:04
  cycle. So there's different stuff. But I mean, they'll have all the same things, mild depression,
• 40:08
  can't build muscle, you know, become insulin resistant, get inflamed. It seems like it's almost
• 40:14
  becoming necessary to look. It sounds to me based on this conversation and how I know you that
• 40:21
  you really do emphasize, hey, get tested. Don't just self-diagnose, correct?
• 40:25
  What I think is most important is to work with a practitioner understands this. It's crazy to
• 40:31
  me and I've heard it from enough of my friends now is that, you know, menopause wasn't a thing for
• 40:35
  most of the OB guides in school. So, you know, to get trained on hormone optimization, I think I
• 40:42
  like the idea of hormone optimization rather than hormone replacement. So to find somebody who's
• 40:46
  been trained, unfortunately in our community, we have a lot of people who are amazing with this.
• 40:50
  And then to look because when the challenges with lab tests with women, it's very different with
• 40:55
  men, right? But with women, when you're going through pairing menopause, they're all over the place.
• 41:00
  So you're getting the snapshot. You know, it's important to look but also to look at how your
• 41:05
  body's handling the hormones when you start to optimize them to see if you're creating any kind
• 41:10
  of metabolite issues. So a lot of stuff that can be looked at there, how well you detoxify as well.
• 41:15
  And that's where you really want to work with someone who this is what they too.
• 41:19
  Two kind of questions before we close to. One has to do with the community, but before we go there,
• 41:25
  I just want to, you mentioned your son's situation and we don't need to go into because you've
• 41:30
  covered it a lot. So if anyone wants to know he had a car accident, I want to more talk about how
• 41:35
  it affected you because it seems like a really defining moment in your life. So how did that experience
• 41:40
  rewire your identity emission? You're so funny. Everyone looks at that and goes, okay, how did
• 41:45
  that change you? And I go, it didn't. Really? It didn't change me. It just turned the volume up.
• 41:52
  I believe that we are never better than when we're challenged. And that literally, Wayne Dyer talks
• 41:58
  about like when you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. I believe that when we're squeezed,
• 42:03
  it's when really our truth shows up, who we are shows up. I remember I had someone who was working
• 42:08
  with me who was going through a really tough time and he just behaved badly. He did things out
• 42:13
  of integrity. It was just awful. And I'm like, what's up? And he goes, oh, it's just because of this.
• 42:18
  I go, no, it's just, it's just revealing who you are. It is not how you show up when things are
• 42:24
  good that shows who you are. It's how you show up when things suck that show who you are. And what
• 42:31
  was interesting is my ex-husband and I are the perfect team for my son Grant because it turned
• 42:39
  to the volume up on both of us. My ex is the most patient, caring, kind person on the planet.
• 42:47
  He notices every detail, everything. He's a fact finder. I am about the opposite of that.
• 42:55
  I wouldn't say I'm not kind, but I'm not patient. I'm going to make sure like what's going on
• 42:59
  here? Are we getting into action? What's happened? So we are a good combo during all of this.
• 43:04
  The biggest thing that for me was I'd been trained in my 30s. I had an amazing mentor who taught me
• 43:11
  that the only limitations are the limitations in your mind that you really, you control your destiny,
• 43:17
  like your perception creates your reality. So from the beginning of the time when we heard about
• 43:22
  the accident, it was how do we get them to be 110% and getting the doctors who were with us engaged
• 43:29
  in that mission and if they weren't, we got new doctors because we knew if they could not hold
• 43:33
  that vision that they wouldn't be able to get us to where we wanted to be. I feel like in the
• 43:38
  time I've known of you and known you, something shifted. Like we had a conversation not so long ago
• 43:45
  where I was like, you know, I love how you're supporting the industry. You're supporting people
• 43:51
  and helping to lift them up and in very much you are a leader. So you're representing leadership,
• 43:57
  female power, but something that's so fascinating is that you're also still a learner. Like you're
• 44:03
  still going and trying to kind of open up be more vulnerable and it's like you're not just like,
• 44:09
  oh, I've reached this echelon, I'm good. You're like continuing to expand and grow yourself,
• 44:15
  which is not always the case with people that are in leadership positions. Has that always been
• 44:21
  the case for you? Someone who is in a leadership position who is not doing that will not be in a
• 44:27
  leadership position for long unless they are like, you know, a dictator. And then they'll get
• 44:35
  overthrown, right? I mean, you know, truly if you're an amazing leader, you must always lead by
• 44:40
  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
• 44:47
  me is like, I am more excited in the consumer world of things than I've ever been. Like there's
• 44:52
  so much amazing research and tools and stuff coming out. And then in the professional side, same
• 44:58
  thing like you look at what's starting to unfold. It could be a time where practitioners are scared
• 45:02
  because of AI or it could be a time where they realize this is my moment to really double down on
• 45:08
  who I am, what I stand for my personal brand because that's going to be the differentiator when
• 45:14
  AI is doing the, you know, a lot of the diagnosing for me. I'm going to become now the coach,
• 45:21
  the artist and the brand. So I think it's a super cool time. I keep pushing my envelope of comfort
• 45:29
  zone stuff, but that was my initial mentor was like, no growth in your comfort zone. So always
• 45:35
  looking for things that push me out of that and that's been everything from like, you know,
• 45:41
  crazy sports decisions to total plant medicine retreats and everything in between. So I'm pretty
• 45:47
  much open to all of those things and looking for always what's going to help me get to the next,
• 45:53
  the next place. I just want to reflect to, I mean, because we didn't even go too deep into the
• 45:59
  community you've been building for years now. We were supporting health practitioners,
• 46:04
  you're supporting business owners, you're supporting men and women to expand their message,
• 46:08
  to support them in helping more people, whether it's through business, through their own processes,
• 46:15
  their own individual processes, and really how to do it, like try it in true practices.
• 46:21
  Through your, why I always think of it as the mindset or something. The events going to stay the
• 46:25
  mindset or something we decided to not change it because it really is a sharing of the minds.
• 46:31
  The whole group moved to being the health business growth collective because the reality is
• 46:35
  that's what we do. We help people grow and scale their health businesses. So we want to make it
• 46:39
  obvious. But then when you're at that level, you come to the summit because you're at a point
• 46:44
  where you can really collaborate, share best practices, network, all of that.
• 46:49
  Yeah, and collaboration, though, is a key word. I think you're an extremely powerful model of
• 46:56
  that of like that you are not just out for yourself. You are here to collaborate. Who do you serve?
• 47:01
  I know that's one of the questions that you have everyone answer in the collective, but
• 47:07
  I've never heard who you serve. So I have two audiences that I really love. One of them on the
• 47:12
  consumer side is again, that woman who has been lied to by her bathroom scale for years and beaten
• 47:20
  herself up and can make such a shift by simply moving into looking at body composition, improving fat
• 47:28
  free mass first and doing that by eating protein first, starting resistance training, making sure
• 47:34
  you've got good recovery, but putting yourself first. And then on the business side is really that
• 47:39
  health business owner that is doing something, they're a rebel. They have stepped outside of this
• 47:44
  system. If you look at what's happened in big healthcare now and big insurance and big pharma,
• 47:50
  more and more doctors are just getting pulled into the system where they can't practice the way
• 47:55
  that they know to be true. And what we found is that this works until someone in their family gets sick
• 48:02
  or they get sick and all of a sudden they don't have the tools and they realize what they're doing
• 48:06
  you know won't work. And they start looking outside and once they do and they find things outside,
• 48:12
  they go oh I can never unsee this, but now I need a way to practice in this way. And so I am
• 48:18
  dedicated to showing those people how to do whatever it is, like what you're doing is rebellious,
• 48:25
  organ meat to seasonings. Come on. So whatever those things are helping them create a business
• 48:31
  that's a legacy. Because for me, the selfish piece of that is early on when I was starting out,
• 48:37
  I thought gosh, I want to help a million people get healthy. And then I was on Dr.
• 48:40
  Phil for two years, like pretty much every week. And I was like, well, I knew what his audience
• 48:44
  reached was. I think it was like 30 million at the time. So I'm like, cool. I was like, all right,
• 48:49
  how do you help a billion? You help a billion by helping others do the same. And I think,
• 48:55
  you know, if we help 10,000, we'll get way past a billion because we're at like 400 million now
• 49:00
  and we probably helped, we probably helped 5,000, 4,000. So you know, we'll see. We'll see how many it's
• 49:06
  really going to take to get there. But I'm thinking 10,000. We'll get us there. Yeah, well, I know
• 49:12
  it's affected Margaret and myself. So I just honor you for all that work you're doing and how much you
• 49:18
  are. I said earlier, like a go-giver and a go-getter. Like you're moving the needle, but you're also
• 49:24
  giving back in ways that I don't, I don't see everyone doing. So I just, yeah, I want to honor
• 49:29
  you for that. Thank you so much for joining us today. Really, I hope everyone watching or listening
• 49:35
  has been able to take something away because I, for me, it's, there's been so much gold. So thank
• 49:40
  you, JJ. Thank you. By the way, I don't know if I've ever asked or looked this up, but what is the
• 49:47
  J in the J stand for? Do you ever reveal that? It's not that exciting. It's not. I, when I was at UCLA,
• 49:56
  I went and taught aerobics in Japan. And I got off the plane and it said, there was a sign that
• 50:05
  literally said welcome, W-E-R-C-O-M-E, Juri-san, J-U-R-I-S-A-N. Welcome to Juri-san. My name then
• 50:16
  was Julie Johnson. They couldn't pronounce it. I became JJ when I lived in Japan because
• 50:24
  that was easier to pronounce. It sounds better, JJ, but you know, there you go. So I came home from
• 50:30
  that time in Japan. JJ and I never changed it. I love it. I was at JJ too after, just after college
• 50:36
  for a little bit. So yeah, that's cool. Well, thank you again. Take care. And thank you all for joining us.
• 50:43
  Let us know what you think. Leave a review, leave a comment, but we look forward to hearing from you.
• 50:50
  Thank you so much for joining me on everyday ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode,
• 50:56
  hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links and resources
• 51:02
  mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K dot com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get
• 51:12
  something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.