Speaker 1: Welcome to the CBD Movement podcast, where CBD experts Emily and Majid, interview scientists, cultivators, government officials, and CBD pioneers to separate fact from fiction. They'll tackle the tough questions around the health benefits of CBD, how it's different from marijuana, and regulations governing the fast-growing multimillion dollar industry. From its seemingly overnight boom to future trends, the CBD Movement podcast is your place to know what's happening first.

Majid: Liz Josefsberg, celebrity weight loss expert, and author of the book Target 100 is joining us to discuss why she recommends CBD to her weight loss clients, and the impact it has personally had on her life.

Emily: Okay, hello, and welcome to the CBD Movement podcast. Today, we have Liz Josefsberg joining us. Welcome, Liz, and-

Liz Josefsberg: Thank you.

Emily:  ... thank you so much for your time today. I'm so excited to chat.

Majid: Thank you.

Liz Josefsberg: Absolutely. I'm so glad to be here.

Emily: Yeah, Liz, so just a little background, Liz is a health wellness and weight loss expert, with over 15 years experience in the health industry, and she is also author of the book Target 100. So Liz, I'm sure that you can give us even a little bit better background about yourself, and I know you've been in the industry for years, so I would love to just get a little background on you for our listeners.

Liz Josefsberg: Sure. I actually ended up in the weight loss industry as my second career. I was actually a professional actress for many years on Broadway. I have a Master's Degree in Opera before that. I came into the weight loss career, because I personally actually struggled with my own weight my whole life, since I was about 14 years old, and I did pretty much every diet there was to do under the sun. And as I got out of my acting career, which was very difficult, having a weight issue during an acting career, I transitioned out, started a production company, and at the same time, I joined Weight Watchers and ended up losing weight with them. And it was a really revolutionary idea for me, because I'd never kind of lost weight in a group before. I'd always done it out of books and things like that.

And so, it really changed my life and I was transitioning in my career, so I got a little part time job at Weight Watchers at the lowest end of the company. I started weighing people in in the meeting rooms, and then I started leading meetings, and then I started to really fall in love with it, and I did more, and more, and more work for them, and little by little, I actually worked my way up the corporate ladder all the way to the executive team, where I was a part of the team that wrote the weight loss programs. I was also their, what you'd call a celebrity weight loss expert. Whenever we had celebrities who needed to lose weight, it was my job to actually fly around the country and help them. So I helped people like Jennifer Hudson, and Charles Barkley, Katie Couric, a whole bunch of people, Jessica Simpson, who have all been spokespeople for Weight Watchers.

So that was kind of my job. I literally flew around helping them to understand how to lose their weight. I basically played about every role you could play at Weight Watchers, all the way up to the top of the company, and stayed there for 11 years and left there, now it'll be almost seven years ago I left, and started my own company because I had become what people were calling a Weight Watchers expert. I really was a national spokesperson for them. I was a cohost of Dr. Oz for a season with them. I was on Oprah, and you name it, Katie Couric Show, all as an ambassador of Weight Watchers, and I felt like I wanted to not be a Weight Watchers expert, I wanted to be a weight loss industry expert. I wanted to know more about everything. In fact, a lot of people call me a weight loss guinea pig. I literally try out diets. I will gain weight, 10, 12 pounds just to lose them on specific diets that are popular, like most recently, I tested keto or whatever.

So I really wanted to know the ins and outs of the industry, not just of one large company. So I went and worked behind the scenes at all of the largest companies out there. I wrote weight loss programs for Life Time Fitness, and I started consulting internationally. I worked in a lot of devices, and electronics technology is particularly interesting for me. So I helped develop new technologies in the weight loss industry, like numberless scales, and breath analysis devices, and new ways to scan and measure food intake [crosstalk 00:05:08].

Majid: That's amazing. So how did CBD become a part of this passion of yours?

Liz Josefsberg: Well, that's what's so interesting, in all of this kind of looking around the industry, I also have looked at supplements for years. I've been a real fan of specific supplements. I'm kind of a naturalist, if you will. I really believe in good things. So things like turmeric were always in my pantry, if you will, of supplements. And so, as I started to hear about CBD and because I'm a research nerd, I just started to really become interested in it and in the endocannabinoid system. I've written so many weight loss programs, and one of the pillars in my book, Target 100, is stress relief because what I've found for most people, is that they are living in such anxious lives, overprogrammed, too many stimuli, so many things that they have to attend to, so much anxiety, and most of their eating, when they're gaining weight, they're eating out of emotional, or stress eating.

So when I started to hear about CBD, I started testing, and testing, and testing different types of CBD as a supplement to a weight loss program. I love it, because it does help people feel less anxious, and sometimes that can really help them to make better food choices in the moment, rather than falling into the habit of grabbing a food because they're anxious. Food releases serotonin, so what they're doing is really smart. They're actually trying to calm themselves, but what it's doing is creating this huge backlash, of then there's weight gain, more anxiety, more eating, more weight gain, more anxiety, more eating. So I saw CBD as this way to help them, along with meditation, and exercise, and movement, and hydration, and eating better to just really actually feel more in control of theirself, their food choices, if that makes sense.

Majid: Got it. Thank you. Yeah, that's amazing.

Emily: I think that that's so interesting, because both of our industries are so similar in the fact that they're ever-changing and ever-evolving, and they change so quickly and so rapidly, so you really have to stay on top of the latest and greatest. And so, I would love to hear just how CBD has made a difference in your everyday life and allowed you to personally stay healthy, and how did that affect your decision to start incorporating that into your program with your clients?

Liz Josefsberg: Yeah. So as I started to take it, what I was really noticing is that I'm a personal trainer, I train people, I exercise probably six to seven days a week, sometimes doubles in a day between myself and a client, and I was sore and very inflamed, and I felt like I had a lot of joint pain just from... I'll be 50 next year, so it's not like I'm a spring chicken. So I was starting to notice that it's harder to do all the things I wanted to do. So I really started there, that was probably one of the first things that I noticed that CBD was helping me with, was this sort of inflammatory response to my workouts. Additionally, because I am 50 and definitely heading into perimenopause, I had anxiety, more anxiety than I had had in the past, and I knew it just didn't like my own anxiety, it felt different, it felt hormonal. And I felt like once I started taking the CBD, I really felt much calmer.

And the third way that it has absolutely impacted my life, is on sleep, which is a huge pillar in weight loss, and a pillar of my weight loss program, is to have not only enough sleep, we need about seven to nine hours of sleep, but the quality of that sleep is what had begun to suffer for me. So I really noticed it in those three very important places for myself before I ever recommended it to a client. I test everything, right? So that's when I really said like, "Wow, I want to bring this in," because if I can get my clients to exercise more, because they feel better, they're less sore, if I can get them to sleep better, if I can get them to be less anxious, their success goes through the roof. So that really led me to say like, "Wow, I want to bring this in, and I want to really push this out there for people to use it as a supplement for weight loss."

Emily: Do you have any specific examples? And we, of course, don't want you to name names with respect to your client's privacy, but is there an amazing success story that comes to mind, or somebody that hadn't really used CBD in the past and incorporated it in their weight loss journey, and just kind of took off?

Liz Josefsberg: Yeah. I mean, I think so many. It's so interesting, because I think of weight loss in pillars, right? And so, as I say, one of those pillars is exercise. So I had a client who was absolutely just not engaging in exercise because she felt like she would get so sore and it wouldn't be worth it for her, that there would be days of feeling like she couldn't recover. So it's really impact recovery, so she could exercise harder and therefore, had broken through plateaus.

I also feel like right now, it's very interesting that I have a couple of clients who are physicians and they've been on the front lines of this pandemic, really working in ways that they haven't worked in many, many years, and having anxiety and stress that they haven't had in many years, and their sleep was really disrupted. But what I've been able to do is help them continue their weight loss journey, even through all of this disruption and stress and anxiety, and I think that CBD, helping them sleep better and helping them reduce that anxiety has been a big piece of that.

Otherwise, what I see is people really, it feels like they don't have, and I wouldn't even call it an excuse, but they just have learned habits around being like, "Oh, with all this going on, with this huge pandemic, with me having to homeschool my kids, with all this, with all that, I can't possibly lose weight as well."

Emily: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Majid: Got it. And when you have customers or friends that come to you and say, "Hey, I'm trying to help calm myself down more," or something of that nature, how do you recommend they start with CBD?

Liz Josefsberg: I like to send them to, I personally like a 33 milligrams sort of starter oil, or I take the soft gels personally, so that's kind of how I direct them is through what I do, because I think that I can really speak to that. I like to get them started on the soft gel because it doesn't have any taste that they don't like. That's the one thing I get people saying like, "Oh, I don't really love the oil because of the taste of it." So that soft gel, like the 33 milligram, I think is a great place to start for them, and the nighttime sleep gummies, and those two become my kind of, that's like my starter pack for people is like just start there, take a little soft gel in the evening when you're first trying it out, take it in the evening to see if it does make you sleepy, because it does make some people sleepy, not at all. I certainly don't. I take mine in the middle of the day and don't feel anything from it at all.

And it's also, I always try to explain that it's not like a "Wow." You don't like take the pill and feel different, it takes consistency and time for you to feel the benefits and the payoffs of CBD. I think people really expect... I don't know if it's just kind of our culture that they're going to take this pill and it's going to number one, just make them skinny, and/or make them have no anxiety the next minute, and it's not like that with CBD. It's very gentle, it's very calming, it's very much something that is subtle. So if I can get them to take sort of that one little gel cap and then the sleep gummy, then I seem to have a lot of success with them kind of then beginning to think through, if they are sore from workouts, using some of the creams and the sticks to put on specific places, and if [inaudible] strain a muscle, using those kinds of things and it just sort of opens that pathway for them, and it's easy and gentle.

Majid: I see. And for folks that are considering weight loss, any advice on how one could be aware of whether CBD is a good supplement to try from a sleep and stress standpoint, as it helps with weight loss? How would you know if this is something you should be trying?

Liz Josefsberg: What I often say to my customers is there's really no downside to trying this, honestly. There are so many ways in which it can help you, It may have some benefits you weren't even expecting. So I usually just say like, it's worth giving it a try for so many reasons. So I would say if you've been thinking about it at all, just give it a try, right? Creep in on it, see what it's all about. The only pushback I ever get, is sort of the lack of education around the fact that there can be a teeny tiny trace amount of THC in CBD. So that's the only thing that I would say, is really educating them and saying like, "Here it is, it's nothing, it's almost nothing," and if you don't want to take a CBD that has any of it in there, you can take an isolate that has no THC whatsoever in it. So I think kind of calming them and getting them through that initial conversation and saying there really isn't a downside.

Emily: I think that's really great advice. And so just, CBD aside, you're so knowledgeable, and I think that we would love to just get your final thought on what advice would you give to others who are trying to lose weight and who may be discouraged with lack of results?

Liz Josefsberg: Yeah. I think it's such an interesting thing. I help so many people, and a lot of people I help one-on-one, right? So I get to kind of really dig in on what people are doing, and I think the thing that I would say that I see the most, if I could give some advice, is I see people are overeating, even on healthy foods. They're eating so many times a day, and they're eating foods that are maybe having health halos, but aren't actually healthy. Right?

So an example of that is especially now with us all sitting sort of on Zoom calls all day, and a lot of my clients have lost a huge amount of movement in their day because of this sort of pandemic, without a commute, without a this, without that, they've lost a lot of movement, they're sitting all day. And I had a woman that I spoke to the other day, who she said, "Oh yeah, well, I just bring a bag of trail mix up to my desk, and I just eat that." And I was like, "Okay, trail mix was actually created for you out on the trail, because it's super high in calories, and you need a burst of energy because you're moving so much, and you're exerting so much energy." To eat trail mix while sitting at a computer, it's counter everything that you want to have happen.

So I think kind of going through, and when I say that I think people are overeating, when I go through even just their food [inaudible 00:17:38], and I'm like, "Hey, tell me what you do from morning to night. Just tell me what you eat," and I'll have someone say like, "Oh, well, I get up and I make a shake, and then two hours later, I make breakfast. Then I have a snack. Then I have lunch. Then I have a snack, then I have dinner, and then I have something after dinner." So eating like seven times, and I'm like, "Okay, wait, what if we just pull back and look at it in this way of three meals and one snack?" And so, it's usually the foods that have health halos, and the amount of times that someone's eating, and that they perhaps are overeating healthy foods. So that would be a big one.

Emily: I think that's a great one, especially with everybody staying home right now and having the kitchen right there. Sometimes I'm guilty of eating two breakfasts.

Liz Josefsberg: Absolutely.

Emily: It's hard. But no, I think that's an awesome tip. Well, this has been so great, Liz, thank you so much for joining us, and I just want to tell everybody check out Liz's book, Target 100, it's it breaks down weight loss into six easy steps, and follow Liz on social media as well. She just made a really fun CBD kombucha mocktail. She's constantly sharing really, really great content, and she's such an amazing resource with so much experience. So we feel lucky to have gotten to talk to you today, Liz, and thank you for joining us.

Majid: Thank you.

Liz Josefsberg: Thank you guys. Have a wonderful day.

Emily: All right, bye.

Majid: You too. Bye.

Liz Josefsberg: Bye.

This transcript was exported on Aug 11, 2020 - view latest version here.