Stop Blaming Menopause with JJ Virgin

What if menopause was a biological upgrade? We've been sold what I think is a lie about menopause, and we're kind of pitched this narrative of crazy, disheveled woman who's gained weight, is constantly saying that they're hot, and then we go and meet a woman like you, and I feel like this narrative very quickly falls completely apart. Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen? Today's guest is JJ Version. She is one of the leaders that shaped how we all think about metabolism, muscle, aging, and she's been a dominant voice in this industry for my entire career. I remember first hearing about you when I was probably 23 years old, you were doing some work, I think, with Joe Polish at the time, and I remember just kind of looking at you and all like, wow, like, is that, can I be that when I grow up? So it's really cool now to be here all these years later, where now I'm over 40, so I'm now in that category of thinking, how do I help myself step into the later years of my life with the best health, best cognitive function? She's a triple board certified nutrition expert, a fitness hall of famer, a four-time New York Times bestseller, and her work sits at the intersection of metabolic health, performance, and what it actually takes to stay strong, sharp, and functional as you age. She serves on the board of A4M's profitable practice blueprint. She's their chief metabolic officer of Lindora. She has done so many exceptional things, and I know you have your podcast, Well Beyond 40, which I was on that has over 22 million downloads, which is a crazy number. You guys should be really excited to be here for this conversation. She's such a wealth of knowledge. Welcome to the show, JJ Version. Thank you. Appreciate you. Of course. This has been a long time in the making. I think I told you this when I was recording your show in Florida, that there were, I think, two separate occasions where somehow we had planned to do something very early in my career, and then somehow I must have flaked out or missed or something, but I'm really grateful to know you now at this phase of my life. I feel like you're such a good role model, and I feel very kindred spirit to you, even when we were talking. I feel like we naturally experienced some of the same things in business. I think we have really similar personalities. So I just relate to you a lot, and I love the way you show up as a woman in business, and I feel like we need more role models like you, because I think very often we get kind of this like, you know, crazy over 50s. This is what happens when menopause strikes, and I just think you do such a beautiful job of somehow looking hotter every year. How do you do that? How do you continue to look hotter every year? What if menopause was a biological upgrade? What if? And I think I'm hoping that's what we're going to get into. Well, first of all, who really loves having periods? I don't. I could totally do without that. Totally. And I had the easiest periods when I was in my 20s and 30s. They were not a big deal. However, and they really never even, they didn't even get to be that big of a deal in my 40s, but still it was a pain. I was like, who wants this? You know? So think about a time when now you don't have any hormone cycling. It's very predictable. You've got that steady state, and it's, and you're like, your kids are out of the house. I mean, these are great times. Like kids out of the house, hormones are stable. It's a win. It sounds like a big win. And I do think we've been sold what I think is a lie about menopause. And we're kind of pitched this, like I said, narrative of kind of this like crazy disheveled woman who's gained weight is constantly saying that they're hot. And then we go and meet a woman like you. And I feel like this narrative very quickly falls completely apart. So that narrative was happening though, with the women's health initiative. It just doesn't have to be that way anymore. Right. So what parts of this are biological where they just happen, no matter what? And then what parts of this potentially are lifestyle induced where they maybe don't have to happen at all or don't have to happen as profoundly as they have been. All right. So menopause has to happen. And I say that because while it sounds obvious, I literally was at a, you know, my other company is helping practitioners grow in scalar businesses. And I was leading a workshop and this one practitioner walked in and she said, she, her, her belief was that we didn't have to ever stop our periods and that we would always have eggs. And I was like, I, I don't even know what to do with you. So we are going to go through this. And the question is, how are you going to go through it? Obviously the healthier you are going into something that easier will be for you. And some people struggle a lot. Some people struggle less. I think the person who's got good metabolic health, but has more body fat probably goes through this better than the other people do, because as you start to go through menopause, you make estrogen in your body fat. So for those of us that are lean, it's harder. Or those of us that are insulin resistant, it gets even harder because you get more insulin resistant. So the big answer to that is here's the number one. The single most important thing, and this is the one that you can absolutely control, is your mindset going into this. There was a study that looked at aging and mindset. And they found that people who were positive, excited about aging lived seven and a half years longer than people who didn't. This is why the narrative out there is so important, because if you start getting into the narrative and busy, I did. You know, when I turned 50, I was totally fired up to turn 50. I had all these goals. I hit my goals. Like everything. I was super excited. I had a great 50th birthday party down in Miami. And then I didn't really think, I didn't set new goals. And at about 56, I started looking at 60 going, uh-oh. And I didn't have the, oh, I'm excited about 60, like I did for 50. You know? And so all of a sudden, I'm watching all of the things that come through your feet about aging and all the stuff. And it's flipped a lot over the last year, but prior to that, it didn't. And so what I decided when I heard that research, I go, well, I can control my mindset. That's the number one thing you can control. You know, thoughts create. You are what you think about. So I'm like, why don't I think about the fact that I'm going to be in the best shape of my life at 60? What does it take to do that? And I'm not going to buy into this narrative, because we know that as you age, you start to lose muscle, you start to lose strength, you start to lose power. You know, all these shifts happen, but it turns out you can really minimize them with the right training, diet, lifestyle behaviors. I mean, massively minimize them. Evidence by the blue zones, where you have these people that are healthy and living long, because they have great relationships, they live in hills, they stay, they keep moving, and they hold food. So that's what I decided to do. And I literally thought back to my life. And while I've always been in good shape, because that's what I do for a living, I did a DEXA scan at 59. It was the exact same results as my DEXA at 39, which just already shows you, because they say, you know, as we age, we're losing muscle, we're losing bone. Mine were the same. Everything was the same. And what do they look for in a DEXA scan? So in DEXA, what they're going to do, it's a very low grade, low grade radiation. It's going to look at fat free mass, fat mass, but more importantly, it looks at fat mass and where it's located, because we know that you're better off being overweight with more skeletal muscle and fat around your butt and thighs than being underweight and having a lot of visceral fat. So it looks at where your fat's located, how much body fat you have, how much muscle mass you have, it predicts your skeletal muscle off of that. And then it looks at your bone mineral density. We actually should be doing this in our 20s when we really are at that time of peak bone. So we have some time to do something about it. The statistics on bone loss are absolutely horrifying. Women in their years around perimenopause into postmenopausal, they lose 2 to 5% of their bone mass each year for the first couple years. So they can lose 20% of their bone in that time when their period stops through postmenopause. That whole thing of you have to be off your period for a year for it to be postmenopause is a little bit bizarre to begin with. So it's hard to describe it. And is that just like inside of the bone, it becoming more porous and kind of breaking down from the inside out? You've got two things going on with bone, right? You've got breaking down, building up, breaking down, building up, just like with muscle, just like with mitochondria. This is how our bodies do. What you want to make sure of, like when you're getting, like let's say you're putting on muscle, you're building up more than you're breaking down. If you're putting on bone, you're building up more than you're breaking down, but with bone, you're always remodeling to keep that bone strong and porous. If it wasn't porous, it would be like cement bricks, right? So it's got to be strong and porous. But what happens as we start to lose bone is it becomes more and more and more porous, so it becomes very, very brittle. And so you break down more than you build up. You want those two even. With muscle building, you want to have more building up than breaking down, right? But so that's what happens there is you're just breaking down more than you're building up. But the reality is we can offset all of these things. The bone one's the one that's really kind of ridiculous because your best bone years are your teens and twenties and we don't look at it. Like the prediction for when you should look right now, when insurance pays for it is 65. And all I can think of is they're doing it at 65 because the likelihood someone will be osteopenic, low bone mass or osteoporotic at that point is pretty high if they've done no interventions, especially not hormones. And so it's a great way to get someone a prescription medication. So there's a valid reason for them to use insurance to pay for a test to now get someone on medication for ever, right? And a brutal medication. So there's that. But when you look at what happens when someone's aging and especially I'm going to talk women specifically, men have their own and or pause that has this happening too. But women are more profound because we have that whole like hormone drop where progesterone, estrogen drop testosterone tends to drop as well. A lot of times thyroid will drop true too. And what happens during that time is we become more insulin resistant, more inflamed. We have trouble building muscle. So our sleep gets disrupted. So you look at and go, even if the hormones didn't help you build muscle, if you're not sleeping well and you're more inflamed, you won't be able to work out as hard either. So all these things kind of compound for you to be probably not moving as much that then would make you even if your metabolism hasn't slowed. Now you'll start to gain some weight, especially visceral fat because you've got higher cortisol and higher insulin. But again, once you know that, you can offset it, right? Because now you know everything going on. The big thing I say about as you start to notice these symptoms, whether it starts for you at 35, 40, 45 with 45 kind of being more common time, is you start to notice these symptoms. You then have your margin for error that you used to have in your 30s is gone. So there is no more of like, I'll just stay out late tomorrow night. That just doesn't happen. You know, I'll have three glasses of wine. I'll stay out late. Those days are done. I think the first thing that should happen, I don't think anyone should suffer. So I think a woman should go work with a menopause trained doctor practitioner. And I say menopause trained because it's bizarre, but a lot of OBGYNs were not trained in menopause. And if they haven't been paying attention, they wouldn't know all the shifts that have happened since the women's health initiative has been completely blown out of the water. But I was fortunate back, let's see how old am I now in my late 40s, I started on hormones and I've been on hormones ever since I never suffered. And that's, I think, the most important thing is it used to be that you need to wait a year or you needed to wait till you really hit your estrogen low. You don't have to now. You work with a doctor who understands how to look at the labs and look at your symptoms and help you navigate through this. And that's the biggest challenging time to navigate is when your hormones are still in flux. Once you get into menopause, it's easy because they're not flexing anymore. You can just dose and you're done, right? It's so easy. Is there an age range that you would recommend as kind of the very outside work? If somebody is ex-age and they haven't started to consider some of these interventions or lifestyle that they should wake up, smell the coffee and grab your book. So here's the reality. And I don't know what you heard when you were a kid, but back when I was a kid, kids weren't allowed to lift weights because it would like make their bones seal shorter. Like it was this ridiculous thing. And I remember at the time going, well, I'm doing acrobatics. So I'm jumping, I'm doing like all this really hard weight workout that's not a weight workout. So that doesn't make any sense. And now we know that's not true. I mean, when you really look at it, when's your very best time to start? Start challenging your muscles when you're a kid, right? Like that's the very best time to start. The second best time to start is immediately and it is never too late. And that's the exciting thing. I used to work, when I was doing my PhD work, I was at USC and they had masters athletes and they were working with people in their 80s and 90s. And then I started, I was living in Palm Springs, so I had a lot of clients in their 70s and 80s. And clients who'd never lifted weights, especially in that era, because everyone had just walked, if they were lucky, or done maybe some jazz or size. And I would take them and have them start, get them in the weight room. And they loved it and they would get strong. You can build strength and you can build muscle at any age, which is super exciting. Now, the scary one is bone mineral density. You can reverse osteoporosis. We now know that Dr. Doug Lucas has shown that. But it is slow going and hard. And you really don't want to get yourself into that position. Because if you lose a lot of bone, it's just so risky and dangerous. I mean, you can break a bone by sneezing, right? So the bigger concern is really your bone mineral density. Your brain isn't broken. It's running an old code. Rake method is a system that maps your neurological patterns, decodes your emotional distortions and rewires your behavior fast. No talk therapy spiral, no getting stuck in your feelings, just logic based rewiring in 20 weeks or less. Head to breakmethod.com and see what your brain is really up to. Outside of weight training, what are some of the best interventions to make sure that you are aging not only gracefully, but beautifully instead of falling victim to the narrative? Yeah, I don't even believe in aging gracefully. I think we should be aging powerfully. It's interesting. All the things that you would think of, and I created a framework for this, I love frameworks and it works with my book, The Metabolism Fix, and it is build, burn, balance. So the first thing you think of is what do I need to do to hold on or better yet build quality muscle? And I say quality muscle because we want to make sure that muscle is strong and powerful. You've got muscle size, but that isn't the same as muscle strength and muscle power. And so the first thing is really making sure that you've got the nutrients on board to be able to build muscle. That's about 25% of the game. It's not 75%. It's 25%. Most of it's doing the work, but making sure that you've got protein on board and you're eating a good bolus of it first thing in the morning and in the evening. So you're getting enough to trigger muscle protein since this. That's about 30 grams of animal or 40 grams of plant and about 100 grams or more overall. So getting enough protein, kind of the rule is 0.7 grams per pound of target body weight is your floor. And then some other things that can help there. I love this fertilized egg yolk called fordetropin. It's yoked. It has been clinically studied to show that it increases muscle protein since this 18%. I love creatine. I made my own creatine for women called shiitin. That's creatine HCl plus torene and magnesium. And I used HCl because you can microdose that compared to monohydrate because of how well it's absorbed. So I love that because it helps you work out harder and recover faster and it also helps with cognition. So a lot of things start to happen as we age. So that's the first part is the build part of the nutrient side. And then on the work side, it's challenging your muscles. I don't want to say lift heavy things. I think that scares a lot of people off. And then they go online and literally it's like you look online. I don't know if it's just my feet. My feet's got chihuahuas and old women lifting deadlifting. Like that's my feet. But I think that scares a lot of people off. And if you've never lifted weights, you're not going to start with deadlifting your weight. Like this is ridiculous. So what I tell people is I want you to challenge your muscles. Because when you think of it that way, the biggest thing that happens for you to be able to get stronger and more powerful and build muscle is you have to progressively overload. You have to do more than what your body is used to. So it has to adapt and get stronger. And challenging your muscles says that I could lift the same heavy thing every other day. But if it's the same thing, I'm not going to continue to progress because my body's used to that. I have to continue to do different things, maybe move faster, lift heavier, add another set, some kind of overload. But that's what you have to do to build muscle. The other piece of that that's super important is the part about the visceral fat. We know it's better for you to be overweight with more muscle and more body fat than it is to be underweight with not a lot of muscle, but not a lot of fat. Like it's better to have fat and muscle than not have muscle, right? But you really want to look at where your fat is. And that's where a waist measurement comes into play because it's a proxy for your overall visceral adipose tissue. But the things that you can do to lose that visceral adipose tissue, number one, if you want to lose body fat, you're going to have to get into some caloric restriction just as the way it is. But specifically for visceral adipose tissue, it's kicking out the ultra process foods. It's doing high intensity interval training. It's doing a little bit of a lower carb diet. Those things tend to help more with visceral adipose tissue like dumping the fruit toast, dumping the ultra process foods and getting and hit training like twice a week and doing a little cold exposure. Those things can help with that. And then the third part of it's really restoring metabolic balance. So it's considering all the things that we need to do for overall health from things like good recovery, getting good sleep, doing things like sauna that help with recovery, making sure that your hormones are working the way they should, your thyroid functions working well. I had a cousin who didn't go to the doctor for 20 years. And her first sign that she had low thyroid function, which I was like, how did you not recognize this was breaking, fracturing a hip? You know, it was just, I was like, what, like you have not gone to a doctor for 20 years, like you just never went and had any labs done. And now a days the way we've democratized lab testing, it's so inexpensive to get these tests done. So, you know, lab tests are super important to look for all these things. But, you know, making sure you're fasting insulins in the right range, making sure your, your inflammation is down, looking at your hormones and your gut, all the things that help you get into balance. I like to always start with the diet and exercise first, because I find a lot of things get fixed just by fixing your food, fixing what's at the end of your fork and fixing your movement can change everything, right? Are there certain labs that you think are very high value and others that are maybe less valuable? Because I think with the democratization of lab tests, now the market is actually very crowded. And I think people sometimes have a hard time discerning which ones are worth the money and which ones aren't. Well, I think we could say that about everything going on right now in the world of health. And I love that you brought that up, because I feel like for so many of us, we're just talking about this dinner last night, it's like we are majoring in the minors before we major in the majors. And so, you know, that's why it's like, all right, how are you eating before we worry about which specialized supplement you're taking, right? So, you know, are you moving before we think about this perfect little vibration plate? I'm like, why don't we just get you freaking walking first? Do some. On the lab test front, I think the most important things that you can be looking at are number one, you should know your apoE to see if you've got the higher risk for Alzheimer's, cardiovascular health, so that apoE for genes, look at those. And then also your LP little a, which I always thought couldn't change. This is the one that's really shows like if you have a risk of more atherogenic plaque. And turns out that women and menopause, their apo, their LP little a can go up. So it can change. So that's not just a one and done test. A good cardio, a good cholesterol profile with an apoB, and then in a homocysteine, and a ferritin, and then blood sugar, but especially if I were gonna only look at one thing in blood sugar, I'd look at fasting insulin, because you can, it can be years of normal blood sugars and high fasting insulin before you start to see problems. So fasting insulin is the earlier determinant before hemoglobin A1C and fasting blood sugar, but I would look at all of those. HSCRP for inflammation. And I think it's really important for women to get these done before you start to head into menopause. One of the things that I saw with people in perimenopause is I could tell if they were on hormones or not, because the ones that were not on hormones, fasting insulin went up, cortisol went up, inflammation went up, LDL went up, LP little a went up. It's like all the cardiovascular risk markers, inflammatory markers all went up during this time. So that's definitely one to look at, as well as monitoring ferritin and iron levels, because that's a time where bleeding can get very wonky. And so you might get anemic. Those to me are the most important ones. Thyroid panel, of course, with a free T3 and T4, a reverse T3 and antibodies. I will tell you, I think the bigger challenge, like I really like the function health tests, the bigger challenge is making sure you know what to do with the information. And this is where, you know, yes, you could throw this all into AI. Yes, they're going to give you a report to, but I really think that there's massive value in working with a practitioner to get the prioritization, because you'll get all this information and it can get totally overwhelming. And you can even throw it into chat or clod and get a printout of it and it'll help you. But to really have the nuance of what to prioritize first, I think this is where you need to start. The other tests that can be really interesting after those ones is to start to look at things like a stool test for your gut health and to look at a tox test if you've got any indicators. Like a lot of times people have got problems, they've got toxicity problems. So you can kind of go down these other rabbit holes when things are not getting better. Those are places I would look. But I always like to, let's try to fix the big rocks first and see how far we get. And then we can dig into more, because a lot of times people will spend fortune on testing that they could have spent on maybe a gym membership, right? Or some stuff for home or better food. When this was maybe probably three years ago now, I was just coming off of having back-to-back babies in my later years of life. And I didn't bounce back as quickly as I had with my first two just because there was such a big age gap between. And I had started working with a personal trainer. I was working my butt off. I was tracking my macros. Like all the things that I typically would be unwilling to do. And I had to do these photo check-ins with the coach every week or whatever. And I'd been doing it for three or four months and I kept looking in the mirror. I'm like, something's got to be wrong with me. I'm in a calorie deficit. I'm doing everything to a T. And I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone should handle things the way this coach did, because it kind of broke me for a few months. But she responds to one of my pictures and goes, there must be something wrong with your hormones. You've made no progress. And how old were you when this was done on? I think I was probably, I must have been 39 or 38. But I remember just being like, just a shot in the heart. Because I was just working so hard. And just from the picture was like, obviously, there's something wrong with you. And I mean, surely there was. But I think with something like this sometimes, and I remember maybe being on the other side of this earlier in my career, working in personal training and fitness many, many years ago, I would often see women who would tell me they're doing everything. And I'm in my mind, I'm like, mm-hmm, sure, I don't think you're really doing everything you say you're doing. But then it actually happened to me where I like, I knew I really was doing it. So I guess with something like this kind of more on the hormone side of the conversation, if somebody is doing the lifestyle pieces, they're lifting, right? They've kind of followed the prescription that you laid out. What then does the hormone conversation become? And as somebody who's looked into this, I feel like it's such an oversaturated, very confusing market to try to figure out who am I looking for? Who would be the, how do I discern who's the right practitioner for hormone replacement therapy? Because that seems very complicated whenever I've looked into it. Oh, cool. So I'm going to unpack this in two ways. The first thing is really ensuring that you are doing all the things I learned early on, just like you were talking about at first, when my clients weren't getting the results, I'm like, they're cheating. And then I had the opportunity to take a bunch of them away for a week. And I watched everything they did and watched some people lose weight, some people gain weight, and some people stay the same. And I'm like, what is going on? And I feel so fortunate that that happened early in my career. It taught me in graduate school, I'm sorry to my professors, but to question every single thing because they like, for them, everything was a bank account. You created this deficit, they lost this much weight. And I'm like, that's not working. Because all my clients were 45. Like I had like the very menopause clientele. That was my clientele. The men were actually in the andropause stage because they were about 10 years older. So I'd like the 45s and the 55s for my clientele. And so the first thing I always want to do is really ensure that things aren't changing here's the reality. Number one, you have to really know what is your daily caloric needs. So when I'm tracking, the first thing I want to see is how much are you moving all throughout the day? I find most people will tend to not move enough. And so I want to make sure that your needs at least 8,000 steps that you're really getting movement in all throughout the day. Next thing is I want to know what your daily, if we just tracked calories every single day by weighing and measuring like way with a food scale, because I don't believe like packages lie, you have to weigh with a food scale. If you do that and you're absolutely on track with that for a week, you will see what your maintenance calories are. So you have to do that because otherwise we don't know we're guessing, right? And then what's going on with your exercise? Are you really doing progressive overload? Are you really pushing yourself enough? And what's going on? So once we have those things, and we know this, and we are tracking body composition with the same in the same way every single day, and I'm monitoring that and I'm looking at the shift every week on an app, I don't care what happens day to day, it's going to fluctuate. I care about the trend line. Is the trend line or is your body composition improving on the trend line? Right? And once we can also doing a waist and hip. Are you getting stronger with your exercise routine? Are you improving? Is your trend line improving on your body composition? If those things are stuck, then we got to start to look and go, what else is going on? And you know, it might be because I want to make sure that the big rocks, it's not an issue with your really not in caloric restriction, or you're not getting enough protein in, or you're dehydrated, which we know can cause fat storage, especially visceral fat storage and lower your metabolism, or you're not training hard enough. So I want to make sure those things are going on. Then I'm going to go down the list of weight loss resistance. This used to be a course I taught to doctors for years, a three day course. And so the first ones I'm going to look at are stress and sleep, because if you're not sleeping well, then you'll be more insulin resistant, you'll store more abdominal fat, you won't be able to build muscle. So I want to make sure your sleep is good, because quite often it sucks, especially if it's perimenopause time, you had little kids. The first thing I would have looked at is what's going on with your sleep. Babies, are you kidding? You know, I remember when my babies, I had four years, I didn't sleep. Right hand and hand with stress, with sleep, of course, is stress. And doing an adrenal salivary index, looking at your cortisol, do you have a normal cortisol pattern? Or did you trash your, your adrenals? Are you burnt out? Or are you tired and wired? Are they elevated? Like do we need to do something to restore cortisol rhythm? Then I'm going to look, because if your cortisol's whacked, it's going to then make your hormones whacked. It's going to make your thyroid whacked, actually inhibits the conversion of T4 to T3, the active thyroid hormone. So it will mess up your thyroid. It will also mess up your progesterone. So if you're, if, and it will lower your testosterone. So like all these things play together, right? So we look at stress, then you're going to look at thyroid, because if your thyroid functions lower, you're going to like really hard for you to drop body fat, super duper, duper hard. And you'll also start to see things like your constipated, your cold, you can't build muscle, your sex drive goes down, you're starting to lose your hair, your outer third of your eyebrows are going. So all that stuff. Then we look at your sex hormones as FSH going up. Are your periods now not regular like they used to be? Is your testosterone lowering? You know, there is no, there's things that generally tend to happen, but they're not necessarily predictable. One of my first things that happened is testosterone dropped. So like some people that won't drop for a while, some people, it's progesterone first. Most usually it's progesterone going down first, messing up sleep, making you feel more anxious. And then the cycle all drops. So that's the next thing is look at those hormones. Who should you work with? You work with someone who specializes in menopause. I have a list of people who I love. I also have a woman in our mastermind who trains bio-identical hormone replacement therapists. So practitioners in that, and her thing is called the BHRT Academy. So she's trained all sorts of practitioners. So they understand exactly how to do this. The big thing is have they done additional training? Have they gone to A4M? Have they gone to Donna's program? Have they done something beyond their hour in medical school? Because it's wild to think that you'd be in OBGYN and not be trained in this. But admittedly, they will tell you they weren't. So you have to go get the additional training. Which means you might be going to someone like I think of Cynthia Thurlow, who's a nurse practitioner who used to work in the cardiovascular ICU. And now she's went and did her training on hormones so she can do hormones. So there's all these great hormone docs out there and practitioners out there. You want to find the ones who have done the training who will listen to you. Right? So that's super important. And now we can check them out. And we can read labs correctly. Because I feel like there's this a lot of times what you're looking for can fall in that subclinical range. So a typical doc may look at you and be like, everything looks great. And then somebody who specializes in this could actually see what's really going on. Well, and here's the thing. The reality is this time you will look at labs, but you must put labs with symptoms. Because at this time, you know, when you look at how you normally do hormone testing, they'll say, oh, do it like day 19 to 21 of your cycle. Well, you don't know what day 19 to 21 of your cycle is when you're in perimenopause. Because that's out the window. Your cycle might be 14 days. It might be three months. So what you're really looking for is the symptoms plus what's going on with FSH. And then you can look at the other stuff. But again, you may or may not see what you're looking for. You're looking for is your period has your period changed? Is it lighter? Is it heavier? Is it shorter? Is it longer? What symptoms are you having? There are what now over 100 different symptoms of perimenopause. So what's going on with you? Because that's the old school was the old school was don't don't have hormones because they'll give you cancer, which we now know is not true. And then it was well, wait until you actually have gone through that year with no period, which means you've just suffered for like five years likely. And you know, and then you can't have them if you haven't haven't been on hormones for 10 years, we all know all of that's out the window now. And that the reality is the minute that you start to feel symptoms is when you should be working with the doctor and looking at investigating this to see if it's right for you. Right. And and I really love I just heard Dr. Kelly Casperson say that it's it's not a matter of if it's right for you, it's a matter of figuring out if there's any reason you can't do it. Otherwise, most of the doctors out there, like the doctors who are trained are saying you should do it because when you look at what kills women, it's heart disease. And 50% of the time, the first sign that they have heart disease is death from a heart attack. Women tend to be disregarded. I've done two episodes now with Dr. Jane Morgan on Well Beyond 40 About Deaths. Women tend to be blown off with their heart disease, their heart attack symptoms. They'll say, oh, it's just stress, you know, and it's not because it looks different than what a man's heart attack looks like. But if you look at what estrogen is, it's very cardiovascular protective estrogen and progesterone protect your bones. Estrogen protects your brain. So when these things go down, we have a problem that and we have way higher risks of Alzheimer's, of osteoporosis, and of heart attack. So that's why you want to look at this and deal with it when you start to see it. Now, beyond the hormone imbalances, which of course, there's also the testosterone piece of it, which that was the first hormone I actually went on was testosterone. Before I even went on estrogen, because that was the one that went down for me first, and it actually helped me raise my estrogen for a while before I had to go on estrogen. But after the hormone piece of it, it's also looking at your gut and it's looking at toxins, because when you are going through perimenopause, you're detoxifying your estrogen through your gut and through your liver. And if those aren't working well, then you have problems as well, and you can get more toxic. So that looking at your gut is super important. If you've got a gut that's gotten more leaky, you might be stalling on your weight loss just because you're more inflamed and more intolerant. It blocks muscle protein synthesis, makes you hold on to weight, it makes you crave food, or it could be a toxic issue. If you've got a big toxic overload, maybe you've got mold toxicity in your house, maybe you've got heavy metals that actually can lower your metabolism. It can lower your thyroid function, it can make you hold on to weight. I had a client once who didn't tell me, she was struggling with her weight. It was before I really knew this level of things. And she went and got bypassed, she didn't tell me. And I was like, you didn't tell me you were going to do that, because the challenge you have is actually like at the time, I remember it was early on, but I just started figuring out the toxic burden body fat issue. And she had a high toxic burden. And then she goes and gets bypassed, but she doesn't resolve the toxicity issue. And she's still not losing weight. So you've got to really dig into all of these things. See, I think of weight so differently. This is a symptom, like if your body is holding onto fat, you got to figure out what's going on. Is it insulin resistance? Is it a toxic burden? Is it a thyroid problem? Is it, you know, what is going on that's making your body do that? Not just, you know, try to starve yourself more, because that can even make it worse as we know. Absolutely. So when we first started the episode, I was referencing how I felt the very kindred spirit to you. And I know that you've been in the business world as an entrepreneur for such a long time. And you've built amazing masterminds up around your leadership. I want to shift gears and just ask a little bit more about how your leadership style and personality has worked for you or against you in large groups of women, because it's something that I've bumped into a lot in my career. And I often feel very misunderstood. So I would love to hear just what your experience has been with this and where it's helped versus harmed. Have you ever done the color code personality test? Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it? Anyways, you know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is irrational. And yet somehow your brain runs the same loop again. This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew Your Mind. This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring, and biblical teaching around the command to renew your mind. 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Renew Your Mind can be accessed at stan.store.bizzygold. No, but we talked about it when we were on your episode. Oh my gosh, Bizzy, you have to do this. So I will tell you that until I was 45, my friends were basically guys. And I was in guy masterminds, guy business stuff, guys, guys, guys. The women were so mean to me, and I didn't know what to do about it. Like, I first of all didn't know any female entrepreneurs. And so, and I remember going once I'd moved to North Carolina and I went to a like a chamber of commerce cement. And I went and sat at the table with all the guys I didn't realize in the South you don't do that. But like the women were kind of the wives of the husbands who had the businesses. So I didn't like what was I going to talk to them about. And I the women in my kids classes were the stay at home moms. And I don't know if you've experienced the stay at home mom situation. They don't like me. They do not like us. They're very judgy. I was not judgy with them. I'm like, man, I salute you. I don't I couldn't stay home and be a stay at home mom. But like nasty and judgmental. And I'm kind of going like, I'm the sole financial support of my kids. This is not, you know, like, give me a break here. So it wasn't until I was 45 that I met this group of entrepreneurial women. I joined a women's mastermind. And the funniest part was I sat down at this group, and they had tissue big Kleenex boxes all around this meeting. And I'm like, why do we have Kleenex boxes? What are we doing here? You know, is an arm just talking about our businesses. And periodically one of them would break down and cry. And I'm like, this is so bizarre. Like, what, you know, there's no crying in baseball, right? Okay. Um, but what's really helped me, because I think much more like a guy in a lot of ways. And doing that color code and understanding my personality and learning to kind of chill it a bit and soften up and not be what's called a dirty red. I think for women, especially when we're working more in a male dominated area, we just kind of harness our inner dude a little bit more. Because we need to and then you forget about it. And then you try to hang out with other women and they're like, what? What's happened since 45 is actually a lot more like my friend groups now are all women. I have I'd say where it used to be that my friends were 80% guys and 20% women. It's now 20% guys and 80% women. I've just happened to met really amazing women who are doing cool things and are more entrepreneurial and not mean and judgy. And I like, you know, which so I don't know if my leadership style has changed. I think I just went out and found the right people for me. Sounds like I need to take some tips on that. What are what are the quality? Well, here's the thing, Izzy. Here's the two. Yeah. Because you're still young. It's the I turned 50 and I don't care if you don't like me tip. There is something that happens and I think it's an estrogen drop where like all the things that you would get hurt when they'd say mean things like I don't care. I don't care. You don't like me. Don't care. Don't like my shirt. Don't care. You know, it's like, don't care. I don't know. Now everyone's gonna like me. It's okay. It's okay if you don't like me, you know, but I think I think also that we have to respect each other. We can admire each other, but you may not mind be your cup of tea. That's cool. Right? I think for me, if it were just not liking me, that would be one thing. I think for whatever reason, I seem to attract a certain type of crazy where they make it their mission to destroy me if I don't want to be their friend in response. It's been a weird life. I feel I really understand that I'm not for everybody and I'm totally okay with that. And I'm sure as I experience my shifts in estrogen, that will become bolstered shortly. I think for me, I've just, I've dealt with so much cattiness and competition among women that don't, I just feel like they don't understand who I am or why I do what I do because they maybe, they project how they would think and feel on to me and then try to match that with my actions. So I just feel like in general, a lot of the really powerful women that I know that are entrepreneurial and are kind of the sole breadwinners of their household, we're pitched in this kind of egotistical self-centered light, which is usually very opposite of what actually motivates us behind the scenes. And I think that feels a little unjust and unfair and just wondering if you're in the experience like do. Life's not fair, A. And honestly, I feel so fortunate to be a woman. I feel like we have the biggest unfair advantage out there. It's like we can work for guys, if a guy wants to really work in a business as predominantly women, good luck, but we can do both. And we actually have an unfair advantage when we go work in kind of more of a male territory. I think the bigger thing is when you sense that there's like, I don't do cattiness. I love women. I support women. I stand for powerful women. I want to do whatever I possibly can to help you get ahead and to help you succeed. I do not see this as competition. I see it as collaboration. Women by our very nature are much more collaborative than men are. Men tend to compete more. I don't see competition. I want us all to rise, right? And so if I sense that from a woman, that mean little catty stuff or the snippy little things they might say about you, we're out, we're done. Like, let's run our path because that's just someone who's in pain. So it sounds like you might have just attracted some people who are just in pain and we just put a little shield up so they bounce off you. Yes, absolutely. Definitely shields up this season of my life. And I'm finally stepping into a season of my life where I have attracted more female friends that are the right type of female friends that don't just want proximity to me, but actually have a reciprocal give and take. You know, I think for the first time in my life, I have friends in my life who don't really know who I am or what I do and they don't really care and it's beautiful. I've been in need of that for a really long time. Yeah, it took me a long time to have these friends, you know, a friend that just is a friend because they love you, not what you could do for them. It can be tough. And I think people who are not necessarily in the position that you or I would be, sometimes it doesn't really make sense. And if you talk about it, they're kind of looking at even you talking about it like an egotistical thing. But I will say early in my career in fitness, I trained a lot of celebrities, teenagers, and of course, people would want to mock their problems, but everyone, everyone's problems are still problems to them, whether you would create that to like a rich people problem or a white people problem, it doesn't really matter. The the issue is still the issue. And I just think the world would be so much better if we actually tried to understand people's motivations and assume positive intent rather than amen. That is the biggest thing I want to live in that world. Yeah, it's that that's one of the biggest things I've I've been thinking about is like, you know, you're never going to get to the end of your life and go, gosh, I was too nice. Never want to be nice and kind. And I check in with myself when I get like angry and mean. I'm like, what's going on? Stop it. You know, it's usually when I just feel over overwhelmed and and tired. And I'm like, then I get like frustrated. But it's like, gosh, you know, if we just if we just looked at everybody went, what if they're just doing the best they can do? Absolutely. I love that. That's probably my classic thing that I have to say to my kids sometimes, because I'm usually like very chill and very sweet and emotionally intelligent. But when I'm over stimulated, I look them to the eyes and I'm like, I love you guys, but I'm really overstimulated. You do not want to keep talking to me right now. And they're like, okay, we're out. Yeah. It's like the absolutely do not push this any further. I wish I'd had that emotional intelligence to understand that about myself earlier. So kudos to you. Thank you. It's been, it's been a work in progress. I think had I not been in the work of break method for all these years, I might not have stumbled on it either. But when you're doing the work to face all of your patterns head on and see your patterns of self deception, if you're doing it, honestly, you, you have to face it at some point. So I think this certainly expedited things that have benefited my kids in the parenting realm for sure. So when I look at your body of work, because I've been following you as I've said since the beginning of the episode, since at least 2015, so it's probably been 11 years or more since I first heard about you from Joe Polish. I love all the different twists and turns that you've taken in your work. And I wonder if there's some area of your work that if you were to go back 10 years ago, you now really see completely differently. Because I find oftentimes people like you or I were, were in the problem iterating it and we're not, we don't have blinders on. We're not, we're, we're actually very much welcome cognitive dissonance. And I think for me, at least I find that exciting. So what is your kind of biggest thing that you feel like you've shifted over the last 10 years that you see completely differently? So I've been doing this 40 years now. What's interesting is a lot of the stuff that I saw 40 years ago is what I've come back to. What would I, like is it what I've changed my mind on? Yeah, is there, is there some a-ha or epiphany or something where you really were locked in seeing something this way and thought maybe this was the cause and effect relationship and then zoom out 10 years? Yeah, I think I've expanded something. So early on, when I was in graduate school, we were taught that no one should lift weights till they lose the weight and that, that it was calories in calories out and you had to create this caloric deficit. And I was like, it wasn't working with my women, right? And so I, I early on, I said, you know, your body isn't a bank account. It's a chemistry lab. And that became my foundation way of thinking where I wouldn't look at calories. And I always felt like if they were eating correctly, like we would achieve homeostasis, right? However, the reality is that your body is a bank account and a chemistry lab and a history book. It is all of those things. We have to look at all of these things. So where I never used to look at caloric deficits before I'd be like, we don't look at that. Like, like, you know, we're better than that, right? No, you still, calories still count. Like if you eat too much healthy food, you're going to have a problem. Now we know you could overeat on protein and gain less fat than if you overeat on like, you know, Doritos, but it's still a problem. And the chemistry lab, the hormones obviously play a big role. And the history book of trauma and toxins obviously play a role. Like we didn't even talk about the trauma piece of it, because I'm not an expert in it, but boy, that absolutely can play a role. So all these things matter. And I think what I did back then was I would pull one out at a time, let's just focus on this. You know, this will be the thing. And now I've kind of looked at it and gone, all of these are tools in the toolbox of your life. And the other piece of that is how do we just focus on the core issue right now? And that's when you I'm going to bring it back to the lab testing of all these things. The, the what's important there is for the person that can look that and go, there's all this stuff going on. And this will take us the next year, we'll be working on this. And here's where we start with any of these things, because it's all overwhelming and all that happens. Like I just did, I was in the Amazon over New Year's and got bit by a bug and got this massive bug bite on my butt. I couldn't sit, right? I mean, it was huge. It was like, very unpleasant. I had to go on doxy cycling, then flagell, then Cipro, then back on doxy. And I'm like, just going, well, there goes all my microbiome is like done. And so I just did that test. And it's like the amount of work to fix my microbiome is overwhelming. I was like, this is going to be like a year. Okay, where do we start? Right. And I think that's what we have to be really careful with with all of the stuff out there is what's the, what's the, what's the thing that if you could fix this one thing, or it was like your biggest constraint, you'd fix that one thing that would make the biggest difference. Let's do that first. It's simple and it's beautiful. It makes total sense, right? Just to kind of find isolate that one thing that it works in business too. Like that's when I'm teaching people in on the practitioner side, I'm like, what's the biggest constraint right now? Like let's go through all of them. Let's just blurt them all out, because especially for women, we like to empty the bucket of like all these things. And I go, what's the if we could pick one that would make this difference. I mean, it works in life, it works in health, it works in everything. It's like, what's that one? Let's just fix that first one. Not 20. Yeah. And then to in a lot of the work that I do, I also try to figure out kind of like an order of operations, like you just blurted out all these things. What is the order of these things? Right? Because there's so many issues that are actually downstream of other issues. So trying to figure out what's the one thing, what's the force multiplier that's working against me right now? Right. It's like, oh, we're gonna worry about biohacking this thing over here, but you're sitting there eating 70% of your diet as ultra processed food. Like maybe let's just fix that one. Keep it simple. What are the best ways that people in our audience can follow along with your work? What books, you have so many different books. Where do you want to direct our audience to right now? All right. So I have a podcast too. We should put your interview in the show notes because it was fantastic. Well, we definitely will. I've been doing a bunch of in so the next book's coming out in December, the metabolism fix, they actually all like I have a customer journey, they all go together, the sugar impact diet and food intolerance. But for this book, we've been doing series of small challenges because again, I like people to focus on one thing at a time. So kind of the easiest place to start is with our eat protein first challenge because I find if you just focus on that, it shifts a bunch of stuff. Your cravings, your satiety, your muscle. So that's at JJVirgin.com forward slash protein first. And then book comes out in December. Well, we'll have you back on to promote your book again in December. So for everyone, it's gonna be a great time. Thank you so much for coming to the show. I very rarely admire other people. And I say that really honestly, I find more often than not, I tend to just keep people at an arms length and some of my spidey senses get activated. But it's just been really cool, just admiring your career from afar all these years and now getting to know you a little bit. So thank you so much for spending this time with our audience and then having me on your show. And I'll definitely put both in the show notes. And I look forward to just continuing to bring you into our world. It's so wonderful to have an expert with all of your many years of knowledge that I think kind of is just no nonsense. I feel like so many times people just, it's this whole nonsense promotional thing. And I just love how simple you keep it. Because usually the truth is somewhat simple. I am a simplifier by nature. I love it. So that's what I do. Thank you. I totally see you and I can totally see where it's just, it's a really good mirror for me. And I just admire you so much. And I'm grateful to have you in my life. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Decoded. We will see you next time.