How to Fix Your Metabolism, Build Muscle, and Lose Fat Fast with JJ Virgin

**Hal Elrod** (0:02)
Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.
If you want to build muscle and lose fat fast, today's episode is for you. My guest today is JJ Virgin, four-time New York Times bestselling author, board-certified nutrition specialist, hall of fame fitness expert, and she's spent over 40 years helping millions of people build muscle, lose weight, boost their metabolism, and live longer. Her new book we're talking about today is The Metabolism Fix, Restore Your Body's Ability to Build Muscle and Lose Fat Fast. This episode will help you do exactly that. JJ, we keep seeing each other.

**JJ Virgin** (1:17)
I know.

**Hal Elrod** (1:18)
Yeah.

**JJ Virgin** (1:18)
You can't stay away from me.

**Hal Elrod** (1:19)
I can't stay away from you. I was in Florida at your studio doing a podcast recently, and then we're at, of course, Author for Author Mastermind.

**JJ Virgin** (1:25)
Which was amazing.

**Hal Elrod** (1:26)
Yeah. And now you're here in Austin.

**JJ Virgin** (1:28)
And here I am. I seem to be in Austin a lot. I love it, especially in August. I try to come as often as possible. Oh yeah.

**Hal Elrod** (1:34)
I mean, you want to make sure it's at least over 100 It's like, oh my gosh.

**JJ Virgin** (1:37)
Isn't it brutal? I figured out there's actually two good months of weather in Austin. Okay. And I think everyone moves here. It's like a Burning Man thing where everyone's proving that they're resilient and they can suffer together.

**Hal Elrod** (1:49)
Yeah.

**JJ Virgin** (1:49)
That's my take. Yeah.

**Hal Elrod** (1:51)
There's the few months where it's unbelievably hot. My wife and I are like, what, should we just go back to the San Diego area? This is really harsh. You're Florida though. That's not much better.

**JJ Virgin** (1:59)
Actually, we were walking last night. It was 80 degrees. I mean, it really has been pretty mild. Yeah.

**Hal Elrod** (2:07)
So I want to talk about the new book, The Metabolism Fix, and I want to start with the biggest misconception that people have about metabolism.

**JJ Virgin** (2:17)
That they think their metabolism is broken. They think it's broken. Like that it slows down as you age? They think that my metabolism has slowed down because I'm aging. It's this huge myth. In fact, this scientist went all over the world, studying people from like young to old, to see if this was actually the case. And what he discovered after looking at over 10,000 people, was that our metabolism doesn't significantly slow down, and even then it's very small, until the age of 60

**Hal Elrod** (2:49)
Okay.

**JJ Virgin** (2:50)
Which is awesome when you think about it. Yeah. Because that's not why your metabolism is slowing down. Age is not the problem.

**Hal Elrod** (2:57)
I've read ahead, so I know what the problem is. You know the punch line. Yeah, I know the punch line, but share it.

**JJ Virgin** (3:02)
We actually created the tagline at Author for Author Mastermind.

**Hal Elrod** (3:05)
Amazing.

**JJ Virgin** (3:06)
Yes, Sam Horne and Rory Vaidenen. The issue is, so what do we tend to lose with age?

**Hal Elrod** (3:12)
Muscle.

**JJ Virgin** (3:12)
Muscle. Now, I don't believe we're losing muscle.

**Hal Elrod** (3:15)
Except for you, by the way.

**JJ Virgin** (3:16)
Yeah.

**Hal Elrod** (3:17)
You're notorious for having more muscle than-

**JJ Virgin** (3:19)
I have to be my walking business card. But I don't believe that we lose muscle because we age. I think we're aging because we're losing muscle. If you really look at this, we don't have to lose muscle, really. We're losing it because something like 20 percent of the people are actually meeting the bare minimum guidelines the CDC has for exercise. Yes. It's crazy, right? So we're not using them, and if we don't use them, we lose them.
So again, that's also amazing. We know that starting at around age 30, the average person starts to lose up to 1 percent of their muscle a year. It's like three to eight percent per decade.

**Hal Elrod** (3:56)
30 to age 30?