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Episode 489: JJ Virgin on HRT and Creatine HCL: The Protocol That Actually Works for Women
00:20:11
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- [00:01]
A
Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Hey, friends. You're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. I'm all about finding sustainable way ways to optimize performance. The kind of work that actually moves the needle on how you feel and function. And that's why I really need to tell you about Prolon's five day program. Most of us are chasing quick fixes that never get to the root of the problem. And the result is sluggish energy, brain fog, and bodies running below its full capacity. But Prolon changes that by triggering your body's natural repair and renewal process. And at the cellular level, it's not a cleanse or crash diet. Prolon is the only patented fasting mimicking diet developed at USC's Longevity Institute. It's a plant based program with soups and snacks and drinks that nourish your body while keeping you in a fasting state. The benefits are backed by science, deep cellular rejuvenation, fat focused weight loss, no injections, and better metabolic health and energy. Plus improve skin and even reduced biological age. And here's my favorite part. It's a complete reset in just five days. No willpower battles, no extreme restrictions. Just a structured plan to let your body do what it's designed to do. Repair, renew and optimize. And right now, Prolon is offering 30% off six sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five day program. Go to prolawnlife.com Jennifer Cohen and use Jennifer Cohen to claim your discount and bonus. That's prolonlife.com Jennifer Cohen and use code Jennifer Cohen. Yeah. You look insanely good. I mean, I was going to ask you, are you on like, are you doing HRT or something?
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B
Like stero?
- [02:23]
A
Yeah, you want something? Well, no, because you're so ripped. And if you don't mind me asking, how old are you?
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B
So I'm 60. Wonderful. 60, wonderful.
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A
Okay, 60.
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B
Wonderful. And I'm an open book. I'll tell you everything I'm doing. I had been on hormone replacement therapy from the moment my hormones started to shift. And here's what was super cool about that. So when I was on Dr. Phil, he had a little chapter in his book called weight loss resistance. And I thought that, what a concept. I fell in love with this idea because working in real life, working in the wild, I saw people that were eating, eating right, exercising, and stuck. Especially, you know, perimenopausal women. And this whole idea that nothing changes when you're perimenopausal. Your metabolism stays the same. Is gotta be men saying that. Not one perimenopausal woman will say that to you. I don't think.
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A
Yeah. You know, and where did you start? Because I think that's a big question that people are very confused with. Well, you.
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B
Yeah, you start when things start to shift. So that's different for everybody. That could be late 30s, it could be early 40s for me. Early 40s, I think it was. I was around 44. I remember all of a sudden I used to always be the sweaty one. Like, sweaty, sweaty, sweaty, you know, and all of a sudden I'm cold and I got a little constipated. I started to lose my eyebrow. And this happened like that. And one of my friends was an integrative med doc who was like, looked at my TSH, which was 2.25, I remember, totally in the range. And I was hypothyroid. And the minute he gave me a little thyroid, it's like the lights came back on, everything normalized. The next thing that happened was I could not recover from my workouts like I used to. Now I know from, you know, Dr. Vonda Wright that this is musculoskeletal syndrome due to menopause. But back then I was like, I had no clue. I was just like, what is going on? And my. My gums started to bleed a little bit and my dentist is like, that's low estrogen. So the minute these things started to show up, I started to treat it. So I started first with thyroid, then I did a little testosterone, which helped bring my estrogen back. I never did progesterone until I started to really use estrogen consistently, because for me, progesterone makes me gain weight and weep. It just.
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A
Yeah, wow.
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B
I never felt good on it. In fact, we had a doctor in Palm Desert, California, who literally, he was a nut job. He put everybody on progesterone therapy, men and women. He thought everyone was progesterone deficient. And you would put em on like 100, 200 milligrams every single day. And then he put everyone on thyroid with a goal to drive their TSH to as close to zero as possible. I mean, horrible. And he put me on progesterone. I gained £12 in a week. I was like, okay, this is not for me. So now Once I started to get, you know, more into perimenopause, I could. I started to cycle it in. But low dose, where, you know, most people are due about 100 milligrams. I was doing 50, so I never could use that. And that's why I say these things. You have to know the symptoms of the different hormones and what's low and really where your ideal levels would be and pay a close attention, because there's no way a doctor's gonna know that. They won't know how you're feeling. They're not inside, you know, in with you. But I literally have been on hormones since my, you know, what, mid-40s.
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A
And do you feel at this, like, at this stage, are you still having to tweak it depending on different things, or now you have it not like, is it dialed in At a certain point?
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B
It's dialed in. What was interesting is, you know, once you get through menopause, life is so. It's fabulous. It's. I always say, you know, there's two amazing things. Empty nesting and menopause. These are, like, amazing things that I hear. People go, oh, my God. Empty nesting. I'm like, it's the greatest thing ever, right?
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A
You have your life back.
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B
It's fantastic. They come over, they leave. It's awesome. And, you know, how old are your.
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A
Kids, by the way?
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B
They are 27 and 28.
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A
Okay, that's great. Yeah.
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B
Yes. So menopause, once your hormones are stabilized, it's the perimenopause that's, like, crazy because it's. You know, you're trying to, like, shift things when they're all over the place and trying to supplement that way. The only time I had to shift this a little bit is I went to Korea a couple years ago and got on this very special ginseng, and it made my hormone receptors more sensitive, and I was able to lower my doses, which was pretty cool.
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A
Oh, wow.
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B
No, I didn't put it together until I was hearing a lecture at a 4M. And I went, oh, that's what happened. I was like, what happened?
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A
That's. So. I find that, like, the problem is that I hear a lot with me. I get. I get asked this a bunch. Like, if people are going on testosterone, but they're not doing estrogen yet. And, like, you know, there's so much information out there, and I think people then stop. They don't even do anything because they're like. It's basically like an analysis paralysis, right? You don't know what to do. So you don't do anything.
- [07:12]
B
You find a really good doctor that knows this stuff that actually specializes in menopause. Right. Which is amazing that you could be in a gynecologist and not trained in menopause, and you'll hear all of them telling you, yeah, we didn't get trained in it. So you find someone trained in. In hormone replacement therapy, because you might need testosterone and not estrogen. You might. You know, it's like everybody is different and there's no. It's not like the guy in Palm Desert with standard dosing. That's crazy. That makes sense.
- [07:40]
A
What about supplementation for. For example, creatine is a big hot. Is a hot topic now. Everyone. Everyone's talking about it. And I think women are still very nervous about creatine because we remember that people like men who are. Who are always taking creatine and they look big and bulky. What's your stance on creatine? Do you take it?
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B
So I just came out with a product, actually. I launched it at Eudaimonia called. My husband named this, wait for it, Chia Teen.
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A
Oh, cute.
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B
Okay, here's what happened. So if I could go back in time and tell my younger self something, it would have been, start creatine in your teens. Now, I was training people at Gold's Gym in Venice, and they were all. And there were all those big dudes and they all took creatine. I'm like, I'll have none of that, thank you. Right, right. And you know, creatine does not make you have big muscles. It doesn't. If it does, if it did, it would be banned substance. What creatine does is it gives your body creatine for the phosphocreatine system to make ATP. So it helps you make energy. And creatine is in your muscles and in your brain. If you have enough. If you don't have enough, it's not gonna be in your brain, but it's in your muscles and your brain. I think it is the single most important supplement beyond the basics of like D and K magnesium and fish oil for women 40 plus. I think it should be an absolute. You need this for a couple different reasons. Number one, it's going to help with energy production. And one of the biggest complaints as women start to get into perimenopause is that they have poor energy. This can help. And it can help not just with body, but can help with mental, like with focus, with mood. In fact, there was a study done on postmenopausal women on SSRIs. And those who did creatine actually had way better changes in their mood than those who didn't. They're now doing studies on it for neurodegenerative diseases and for cognition. So it helps you work out harder because of the energy. It also helps you with recovery, but it doesn't build. You don't take creatine, sit on the couch, and something happens. Now, here's what happened. As I started to dig into this a couple years ago, I looked at. I'm like, everybody needs to be on this, right? And especially women. We have less tissue stores of this than men do. So I was like, we need this, and we need it in our brains. And so I was like, you know, pushing it. I was a creatine pusher, and everything I'd ever heard was monohydrate. It's the most studied. So do that one. Which is true. It's the most studied, but it's kind of like, you know, a rotary phone. Just because we've always used it doesn't mean that's the best one, right? I mean, would you switch over? You know, would you still be using a rotary phone at this point? No, you would not. So what I kept hearing back from women, and these were some of my closest friends who are doctors who are like, I'm not gonna take it. I don't like the way I. I feel bloated, my stomach hurts. I was like, just get through it. And they wouldn't. And I go, oh, this is a problem. Well, a year and a half ago, I was speaking at a medical conference and talking about powerful aging, and I talked about creatine. And this. This researcher followed me out, and he had. He's the one who developed and patented creatine HCl and showed me all the research showing that creatine monohydrate, about 15% of it actually gets into your bloodstream. And so that other stuff is causing some of that extracellular fluid retention, some of the GI issues and that. So he went to solve the problem and created an HCL version that all of it gets into the bloodstream. So you need a seventh of the dose, and you don't get those side effects that are, you know, frustrating women. So I wouldn't have done this except I kept hearing from women and hearing. I was like, all right. So that's what I created was a creatine HCl. And what you'll hear out there is, well, monohydrate's the one you should take. It's the most Studied. And all the rest are marketing hypes and they're just more expensive. Except the reality is you need a smidge compared to the monohydrate. So BS and I had all the research studies to show this uptake and it's significant. So it's pretty interesting. So that's what we just launched because I want women to take it and I know how crazy we get with weight.
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A
We do. And of course we do. It's all psychological. That's why we are cardio junkies. Right? Because we think if we're sweating hard, harder, and we're moving faster and we're doing it longer, that we're getting a better result. And that's like the same thing. Like the.
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B
I think so 80s.
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A
It's so 80s, but. But yet that's what you see. Like there was a great meme was that was going around that someone sent me of like middle aged women exercising. They're doing everything but with the exercises they should be doing. You know, they're like bouncing on a swing outside or they're doing.
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B
They're on the rebounder.
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A
Yeah, yeah, they're on the rebounder. That was one of the.
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B
Remember the rebounder we. So when I was at ucla, I still remember this in the sorority house because somewhere the idea was like you could burn a hundred calories with ten minutes of rebounding. So literally people were like pigging out and jumping on the rebounder.
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A
Totally.
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B
I mean, our body is not a bank account. I mean, come on.
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A
It's true. And I feel like, listen, the way I look at it is like some movement's better than zero movement. So all the power to you. But if you want to change your body composition, it's not going to be doing that. And that's just the bottom line. You don't have to, you don't have to believe it, but you'll, you know, the proof is in the clinic.
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B
It's just science, you know, and here's the big challenge is unless you're tracking your body composition, you wouldn't know anyway. And this is why we have to move off of weight and we have to go to what that weight's made up of. Because, you know, my husband, case in point, weighs the same as he's always weighed and he's always been athletic. He's a volleyball player, he was a baseball player. And so a couple years ago we go get our DEXA scans because I'm like, I'm getting in the best shape of my life for 60. So I trot him on in there, he's always like, we'll go along with whatever I come up with. And he was a skinny fat. He was 25% body fat, which is high for a man, you know, and he was. He was a skinny fat. I was like, way lower than him, and I was like, wow. At first I was like, the machine must be wrong. Except it can't be wrong. It can't be that wrong, right?
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A
Yeah.
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B
So we completely shifted his programming. He'd been resistant to going on testosterone. He had lower T gets on testosterone therapy, but also starts finally tracking his protein and getting the protein that he needed. Starts finally doing his creatine. Like, he does all the things that I'd been, like, yakking about to do. He does them all. Starts lifting heavier, and he goes. He drops 27 pounds of fat and puts on 24 pounds of muscle. Now three pound change. Looks like an entirely different body. I mean, like, this is like, he looks like a high school, you know, volleyball player body now.
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A
Wow.
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B
It's a three pound change. Three pounds. He went from 25% body fat to 10% body fat.
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A
And so is it because he also. He was doing heavier weight more consistently, and he dropped the other kind of more of a cardio, like biking, volleyball, whatever.
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B
He was never doing. He does volleyball. He'll do that for hiit training. He was never doing. Like, when I met him, he was drinking smoothies with, like, juice and running. So we stopped that quickly. But, you know, he was not doing heavy, heavy weights and he wasn't eating enough protein, and he wasn't consistent with things like creatine until he got the dexa. And that's why these things are so important, because when you see it in real life, like, you can't go, oh, you know, because he looked fine, you would never have thought anything of it. But the difference now is insane.
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A
Wow. No, I know. I think a big issue with is bloating. Women get bloated because the amounts that maybe they're taking. Is there a way to eliminate bloating from taking creatine? Is it just the amount? Is there other things that we should.
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B
Yeah, take creatine, hcl. You won't get bloated, so you won't.
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A
Get bloated with that one.
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B
Okay. You may get a little bit of fluid into your muscles. If you're lucky, that's what you want to have happen. You might get a little bit of it. If anything, it would be a half pound to a pound that would normalize. But you want that, like, if you could get that, you should celebrate it. I didn't get.
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A
So you didn't get that.
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B
I wish I had because that's good. Like remember when you're doing bioimpedance scales at home to check your total body, your body composition, it looks at total body water because total body water is how we look at fat free mass, more muscle, more water in the muscle. Right. So we look at that number. You want more of that. So you might get a teensy bit of it. But that's the whole reason I switched to hcl is you don't have to take the higher doses. The dosing is somewhere between 750 milligrams to 1.5 grams. I mean it's tiny doses, so you don't have to take a lot. And by the way, the other cool thing with creatine, I did a lot. I've been like last summer, did so much international travel jump in time zones and I read about it for sleep deprivation. It's the best jet lag formula there ever has been. It's amazing, really. Oh my gosh, like solved my problems.
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A
So does it help you fall asleep or is it just.
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B
It gives you that energy? So what I do is like the minute I land, I take some and then I'll take it like two more doses throughout the day.
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A
Interesting. Yeah, I actually, I actually read a study that was saying that if you are sleep deprived and you take creatine, it will. That the creatine will actually help your mental performance. Because if you're taking the creatine with the sleep deprivation.
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B
So I guess enough. Yeah, your muscles will preferentially, preferentially use it and you need enough to get into your brain too. So I pop a little bit more when I'm, when I'm traveling to make sure I have it like some of these neurodegenerative studies. Now the company that has the patent on this hcl, I turned them on to some big top. If I said their names, you would know them. Brain researchers who are using it now in their brain studies because, you know, they don't have to now use 20 grams of monohydrate, which is what they were doing, which was causing GI distress. Now they can use a couple grams.
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A
Oh my God. I want to try this.
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B
It's called, it's send you some.
- [17:53]
A
Please do. Yeah, I'm going to send it to you. I really will. Because I haven't started to take creatine because I'm one of those girls, women who don't want to be bloated who don't want to do all that.
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B
And so we bloated who said, you know what? Sign me up for that bloat.
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A
Yeah, no, I mean, that's exactly. And the thing is, I'm not a shake person. Right. I don't believe in these shakes. Shakes can you end up having a thousand calories in a shake? And mostly sugar. So I like to actually eat real food. Are you mixing creatine with water? How do you do it?
- [18:22]
B
So I have two different ways I have it. One is in capsules. I put it together with taurine and magnesium because I wanted a little ATP booster. And both of those. I mean, we know taurine helps with longevity, but both of those help make ATP. So I was like. And we never seem to get enough of this stuff. So I was like, I'll put that all together. So I created. That's the product I created. And it's in capsules. You take three and you can take another dose. Like, I'll take three as my foundation. Then if I'm going to the gym, I'll take another three. Or you can use the powder and throw it. What I like to do when I'm going to the gym is electrolytes, creatine, and some essential amino acids.