Local 3 News Interviews Dr. John Jaquish

Julie Edwards of Local 3 News talks with Dr. John Jaquish about why cardio isn’t always the answer and finding success with weight loss.

Full Transcript

Julie Edwards : We are having beautiful weather now here in the Tennessee Valley. Spring is here, summer is right around the corner. Perhaps the most beautiful season of the year here, but also for an awful lot of us, that dreaded time of year to be buying bathing suits, putting on your shorts, and not hiding really from the weight that you might be wishing you could lose.

So we’re very happy this morning to have on the show Dr. John Jaquish. He is with Jaquish Biomedical and he’s going to kind of guide us through this morning with some tips he has discovered on how to get your bones and muscles stronger, burn that fat, and look and feel your best. So nice to see you this morning.

Dr. John Jaquish: Thanks so much for having me.

Julie Edwards : Admittedly, I hit the vanity part first because sometimes that’s what drives people to try to find the right diet, the right lifestyle, that works for them. And then they’re pleasantly surprised to learn that health benefits come right along with it.

Dr. John Jaquish: That’s right. I typically take that approach too. It’s easier to appeal to somebody’s vanity because their health can be something that’s off into the future. Easy to put off. But it’s like, “Hey, you want to look good for summer?” People respond well to that.

Whenever you are healthy, your body just looks and performs better. I use the word perform because you’ve got quite a resume in working with professional athletes and helping their bodies work optimally.

There’s almost no difference between working with professional athletes and regular people. Sometimes the results are a little bit more extreme with professional athletes just because they’re genetically gifted, but they’re no different than the rest of us. They also would rather sleep in, they would also rather eat cheesecake than maybe a healthier option. So it is interesting. I think a lot of individuals think that professional athletes may have it easy. They don’t.

Julie Edwards : So let me pick up on some tips that you shared with me to help us cover a lot in the little bit of time we have. So first crack out of the gate, you’re a fan of intermittent fasting. You like that approach.

Dr. John Jaquish: Certainly easier to stick to than calorie restriction. Calorie restriction, well, there’s a caveat to that. When you’re low carbohydrate, you’re not hungry. Most of us who are constantly eating carbohydrates, we’re depending on the glucose system of energy, which means as soon as we’re done burning glucose, the last meal we had, we want more. And this is why sometimes people wake up in the morning, they go to work and by 9:00 AM they’re hungry. They need to eat something. And there’s a physiological need for them to eat that they’re feeling from inside their body.

Whereas if you break that cycle and start using the body’s ketogenic fuel system. By the way, ketogenic nutrition is not a fad, it’s an actual system of energy in the body. We have two systems. We typically only use the glucose system because we’re just constantly shoveling sugar in our mouths. And whether that sugar is broccoli or that sugar is a candy bar, it still keeps us dependent on that same glucose system.

So by breaking that cycle, that’s one thing intermittent fasting does, you end up burning your body fat instead. The highest your low-density LED protein, LDL, which used to be called bad cholesterol, it’s not really. It’s wonderful now because we have a better understanding of it. It is highest when you’re in the fasted state. So saying LDL is bad for you is like saying weight loss is bad for you.

Julie Edwards: So there’s so much that we can talk about. Something else, so in your work with athletes, you would think, “Oh, they must be working out all the time, doing the cardio workout.” We’ve kind of got a misunderstanding of that too. More cardio does not always equal weight loss.

Dr. John Jaquish: Oh, even a little bit of cardio does not equal weight loss. Wait, like cardio, it upregulates cortisol. Cortisol does two primary things to our body composition. And when you do cardio in rapid succession, every couple of days, it keeps this elevated level of cortisol. Cortisol does two things. It gets rid of muscle. So when people start to lose weight, when they start doing like 5Ks, or whatever they’re going to. What they think is losing weight, but what they’re losing is muscle.

And the other thing cortisol does is it preserves body fat. So it keeps you as fat as possible as long as possible. This is exactly the opposite of what people want when they’re typically doing cardio to lose weight. But they don’t know that. Now the research has been out there for 40 years and there are a few people who have said it, but the gym industry, that’s a little too much science for them to present. Plus they’re selling you access to treadmills, so they don’t care if you’re misled.

Julie Edwards: So did I hear you say that when you work out you are creating cortisol, you’re building cortisol, but the cortisol is what causes you to hold onto the fat?

Dr. John Jaquish: Right.

Julie Edwards: So it’s a self-perpetuating problem.

Dr. John Jaquish: Right, right. It just makes the problem worse.

Julie Edwards: So I left something out and introducing you that was an error on my part, but I’m hoping you’ll go there with me because that is you have invented this bone density building technology. Is that what’s called X3 and can you explain that?

Dr. John Jaquish: No, that’s OsteoStrong. X3 was my second invention.

Julie Edwards: Can you give us a synopsis of the OsteoStrong and how you started with that? What led you to that?

Dr. John Jaquish: I developed it to treat my mother’s osteoporosis. So she was diagnosed with osteoporosis many years ago. Felt like it was going to be very limiting for her life. She read some of the fracture statistics and was terrified. Then she has prescribed medications that she didn’t want to take because she thought the side effects were just unreasonable. So what I did was I built an impact emulation device. OsteoStrong works as a lot of exercises do, but in a controlled and measured way so that we put axial force through the bone. So this is my humorous bone. We’re putting load from one end to the other. So taking that bone and compressing it end to end.

It’s a process that feels fantastic. As soon as that compression is released, because inside the bone it looks like a honeycomb, all those little walls inside the bone become slightly bent. Then they spring back a position. When they spring back in position, now they’re stimulated to pull in minerals and decalcify. This is the normal process that children use and teenagers use to build bone. They’re running, they’re jumping, they’re going through high impact. So we emulate the impact to get the same effect.

Julie Edwards: How do people access OsteoStrong?

Dr. John Jaquish: There are clinics. There are 250 clinics in 12 different countries. Quite a few in Tennessee.

Julie Edwards: I have to tell you that I could talk to you for the full hour if we had time. I have question after question after question. And you have got resume bragging right after resume bragging right. And I wish that we had more time, but if other people want to find out more about you or to check out the book that you have written, how do they do that, on Amazon? Did they get your book?

Dr. John Jaquish: The book on Amazon, it’s called Weightlifting Is a Waste of Time. It’s a Wall Street Journal bestseller. The other place is my website, which leads to all my social links doctorj.com.

Julie Edwards: Well, it has been a pleasure talking to you and I hope that we can do it again. So I’m not going to worry so much about hitting that steep hill in my neighborhood today when I go from our walk. So thank you for that.

Dr. John Jaquish: Better a choice. All right.

Julie Edwards: Great talking to you.

Dr. John Jaquish: Good talking to you.