The Virgin Diet (2 page)

If you eliminate a high-FI food and then reintroduce it, you’ll know instantly if it’s been causing you trouble because any symptoms you have will be through the roof. I had a client who had never realized that she’d been struggling with egg intolerance. When she cut out eggs, she lost 10 pounds in 3 weeks without even trying. Then, when she ate an experimental plate of scrambled eggs, she got so sleepy that she almost passed out. Eggs had been making her tired, fat and old before her time. It was only when she gave them up that she figured it out.

Have you ever heard the story of the lobster who didn’t realize it was being cooked because the water just kept on getting warmer and warmer? That’s how a lot of my clients are about eating high-FI foods. That’s how I was, too. One day I woke up and realized that I had gained 10 pounds, had developed a bloated waistline and was struggling with mental fog and fatigue almost all the time. I hate to admit it, but I also looked 10 years older. How had this happened? My symptoms had developed gradually, and I had simply learned to live with them.

When I cut out high-FI foods, my new normal was terrific. I lost all the weight I had gained, and I looked young and glowing again. Problem
solved, right? Then I took one tiny bite of egg—by accident, it was lurking in a sauce—and I almost doubled over with cramps and bloating. Suddenly it looked like an alien was growing in my stomach.

The Virgin Diet is the key to losing those stubborn pounds—and all those extra years. If I want to keep feeling good, looking young and staying slim, I stick to the Virgin Diet. Now you can follow the Virgin Diet and get the same great results.

Like most people, you’ve probably longed for your old figure and your younger metabolism. You’ve chalked up your leaner friends’ skinny jeans to luck and genetics. You’ve tried every fad diet and superfood, hoping to resemble the Hollywood stars who look better at 40 than they did at 20, seemingly by magic. And you are reluctantly accepting a fate of an ever-expanding waistline as part of aging.

Well, what if I told you that fat is not your fate? I’m almost 50 years old, and I put most younger women’s bodies to shame. Better yet, so do my clients. You can stop gaining weight and lose the pounds you’ve packed on over the last decade simply by eliminating the bad foods. Time makes you wiser not wider, and you have probably spent a lifetime of moderately consuming the wrong foods and gradually undermining your body’s ability to maintain or lose weight. The fewer wrong foods you eat, the leaner you will be. By eliminating all the wrong foods for 3 weeks, you can drop up to 7 pounds and look years younger by next week.

You can stop gaining weight and lose the pounds simply by eliminating the bad foods.

Let’s get one thing straight: even if you’ve been on a dozen diets and struggled unsuccessfully to lose weight, the Virgin Diet can work for you. In fact, the more trouble you’ve had with losing weight and keeping it off, the more likely it is that food intolerance is at the root of your problem. Ironically, trouble with previous diets probably makes you a better candidate for success with the Virgin Diet. If they didn’t work, food intolerance was very likely a big part of the reason. Heal that problem, and off come the pounds.

The more trouble you’ve had losing weight, the more likely it is that food intolerance is your problem.

Does pulling high-FI foods from your diet sound like an impossible task? Believe me, I get it. I hated the thought of giving up my favorite high-FI foods. I wondered how I’d live without my occasional slice of sourdough bread and my beloved breakfast omelets. I couldn’t believe I’d ever be happy without that inch of foamy milk on my cafè Americano. The irony is that you usually crave the very foods that are hurting you, and eat them every day.

But you know what? Now that I live on a low-FI diet, I feel happier, healthier and more energetic than I ever have. My mind is clear and focused, and I love the way I look. My life has been much easier to navigate without high-FI foods, and I promise, yours will be, too. In just 3 weeks, you’ll reverse your weight gain. You’ll look and feel at least 10 years younger. And you’ll be able to safely reintroduce the foods that your body likes.

The Virgin Diet can work anywhere with anybody, no matter where you live, how often you eat in restaurants or how frequently you travel. I travel a lot of the time and rarely have time to cook, but when I’m home, I like to make dinner for my kids. I’m not the Queen of Cooking, but I am the Queen of Meal Assembly. I’ve stuck to the Virgin Diet
everywhere in the United States, including some tiny towns too small to even have a full-sized grocery store.

In
Part III
of this book, I’ll show you how to create delicious low-FI meals (including plenty of easy, crowd-pleasing recipes) and how to maintain the diet when you travel, eat in restaurants or cook for your family—even for picky eaters! You can prepare low-FI foods for your family, and you can prepare them on a budget. You don’t need access to special health-food stores and you don’t need to eat weird or unusual foods. All you have to do is cut the wrong foods out of your diet and replace them with the foods your body likes.

So don’t worry about sticking to this program. Whatever your situation, I know you can make it work. Just give me 21 days, and you are going to be blown away by how great you feel.

I’ve been working with weight loss and food intolerance for more than 20 years. I’ve helped hundreds of physicians expand their knowledge of nutrition and weight loss, and I’ve helped thousands of men and women lose weight. Some of my greatest success stories can be found throughout this book. Clients who have struggled with their weight for years suddenly begin losing weight almost without effort—as long as they leave high-FI foods out of their diets. People who have suffered from acne, arthritis, joint pain, mental fog, fatigue and a dozen other complaints suddenly lose their symptoms. Their skin clears up, their hair looks shiny and full of life and they appear 10 years younger. That is their success story—and it can be yours.

It was certainly Melanie’s. After 21 days on the Virgin Diet, she lost 10 of her target 20 pounds without any reduction in calories or change to her exercise routine. A few weeks later, she lost the other 10 pounds and was feeling stronger and more energized than she had in years. She no longer had to stress over calorie-counting or obsess over the scale. She just had to leave out of her diet the foods that her body couldn’t tolerate.

“You know, it’s funny, JJ,” she said the last time we talked, “now my friends all want to know what I’m eating to look so terrific.”

“That’s great,” I answered. “What do you tell them?”

Melanie laughed. “I tell them it’s what I’m
not
eating that’s made all the difference!”

My problems with weight go back to when I was about 6 or 7 years old, thinking I was fat. I started dieting when I was about 13 years old. My mom took me to the doctor for diet pills when I was 16 years old.

Over the years, I’ve tried just about every diet known to man, but the weight kept creeping on. Every time, it was the same: I would lose a few pounds and gain it all back plus some. At 40, I weighed more than 315 pounds. I knew I had to change my life, but I wasn’t happy, and I found comfort in food. And I had a lot of medical problems. First, I suffered from a pinched ulnar nerve. Then at age 42, I was diagnosed with attention
deficit disorder, or ADD. A couple years later, I was diagnosed with asthma. After years of being hospitalized for asthma attacks and gaining 80 pounds, thanks to medication and depression, I was told by my pulmonary doctor that I had gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD, which was exacerbating my asthma. This was the first time I realized that the foods that were causing me to be fat might also be the foods causing these other serious illnesses and disorders.

By this time I was back up to 298 pounds and housebound. I was so fat! I was embarrassed to be seen. I felt like a complete failure. I was on three daily medicines for asthma, a nightly antacid, an ointment for eczema and bottles of ibuprofen for joint pains. I had to wrap an elastic bandage around my knee every day to manage the pain.

When I tried to diet, the results were frustrating until I read about JJ’s Virgin Diet. Her explanation of food intolerances described everything I was feeling. I took the symptoms test and marked almost everything with the highest score. Right then, I committed to the plan. After just 3 weeks, I lost 11 pounds, including a couple inches off my waist and hips. I cleaned up my shopping, my kitchen and my health. As it turns out, I am gluten-and dairy-intolerant. And much of the food I thought was healthy really wasn’t.

I learned how much I have poisoned my body over the years. Now I don’t have cravings for sweets; fast foods; or fatty, starchy, high-carb foods. I am satisfied with whole, clean, natural foods. My asthma symptoms are so much less than before that I almost don’t need the medicine at all. My eczema spots are all but gone now. I can take walks without pain. I don’t have headaches. I have not had any indigestion since my second day on the plan. My ADD seems to be nonexistent. No more brain fog. No depression. I have energy that I haven’t had in years. Most of all, I have
hope.

I have learned for the first time what to eat, why to eat and when to eat. I feel so much better! This program saved my life!

Leslie was at the end of her rope. She’d been to every doctor in the Los Angeles area, and nobody could help her. As it happens, her stepmother is Suzanne Somers, an expert in health, beauty and fitness. Suzanne knows all the gurus, besides being one herself. But none of them could fix Leslie’s problem. Leslie was 40 pounds overweight. It didn’t seem to matter whether she ate or not. She had this chronic bloating thing going on—in fact, she got more and more bloated as the day continued, no matter how little she ate.

I loved Leslie on the spot. She’s adorable. And I was struck by how much she was already doing the right things—and how little any of them were helping her.

“What’s going on, JJ?” Leslie asked me. At this point, she was beyond frustrated. “You’ve got to help me out, because nobody else has ever been able to.”

I felt a lot of sympathy for Leslie, who was working so hard to lose weight—and with so little result. She exercised and was very careful about counting calories and controlling portions. But as I tell all of my clients, your body isn’t a savings bank or a calorimeter. It’s a chemistry lab. Counting calories and measuring portions just isn’t enough. You have to know how your body is responding to the foods you eat. And Leslie’s body was telling her that she wasn’t eating right.

I suspected that Leslie’s problems stemmed from food intolerance. She had been eating a high-FI diet for years, including all the supposedly healthy choices: eggs, tofu, whole-grain bread, whey protein shakes. She lived on diet sodas and café lattes with skim milk. Sometimes she’d treat herself to some corn chips and salsa. That made at least 6 of the 7 high-FI foods right there: eggs, soy, gluten, dairy, artificial sweeteners and corn. All she was missing was sugar and peanuts, and when she occasionally ate desserts or processed foods (which are often made with peanut oil), she was consuming those, too.

“Look,” I told Leslie, as gently as I could, “you can be doing all the right things—exercise, careful eating, the works—but if you’ve built up a food intolerance or messed up your digestive tract, even the right things can’t help you. Right now, your immune system is on high alert, and it’s overreacting to many of the foods you eat. Until we get your immune system to chill out, you won’t be able to lose weight.”

Food intolerance is one of the most frustrating conditions I know. All of a sudden, you can’t lose those extra pounds, even when you are eating and exercising exactly as you always have. Sometimes you might even be eating less and exercising more—and you still gain weight! How unfair is that?

The best way to get Leslie’s immune system back on track was to cut out all 7 high-FI foods and increase her intake of low-FI foods. Once her immune system wasn’t jumping into hyperalert and flooding her system with inflammatory chemicals, her digestive system would have a chance to heal. I also suggested my special Virgin Diet Shakes as a source of protein. Along with the healing foods and healing supplements I recommend, the Virgin Diet Shakes would help reverse inflammation, reducing all those “protective” chemicals that were causing Leslie’s body to gain weight, aging her skin and hair and sapping her energy. In 7 days, I promised Leslie she would lose the bloat and look years younger. The Virgin Diet was the key.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened. When I saw Leslie a few weeks later, she was so excited that her words kept tumbling over each other. “I’ve lost more than 10 pounds already, and I feel so hopeful about the other 30! Look at my skin. It hasn’t looked this good in years! My friends keep asking if I was away on vacation. At work, they know I wasn’t, so they’ve started a rumor about me having a new boyfriend. I can’t believe how good I feel!”

I was so happy for my client because she had finally stopped accepting the weight gain, exhaustion and premature aging that she had come to believe was her lot in life. Instead, she was losing weight, feeling great and looking 10 years younger. Terrific was now her new normal. It can also be yours.

So, what’s the first thing I’d like you to do on the Virgin Diet? I hope you’re sitting down because my first piece of advice might shock you:
stop counting calories.

Your body is not a savings bank or a calorimeter. It’s a chemistry lab.

That’s right, I’m suggesting that you stop counting calories because your body is not a savings bank or a calorimeter. It’s a chemistry lab. Although the total number of calories counts, it is only part of the story. The
source
of the calories matters far more. If your calories come from foods that are causing your body trouble, then it almost doesn’t matter how much or how little you eat. Even moderate intake of problem foods sets up your body for weight gain. And as we’ve seen, those problem foods are not just cookies, cake and full-sugar soda. They include
artificial sweeteners and diet sodas, low-fat yogurt, eggs, soy and whole grains.

Now here’s the key to the Virgin Diet: when it comes to weight loss and healthy eating,
moderation doesn’t work.

Why? Because weight gain among the nonobese is generally gradual, averaging almost a pound a year as the result of only moderate changes in diet and activity. Yes, if you binge for months on potato chips and ice cream, you’re going to put on weight quickly. But that’s not how most people gain weight. They continue eating their normal diet, with maybe just a tablespoon of butter here or a few extra cookies there. Before they know it, they’ve gained a pound a year, which adds up to 10 pounds in 10 years and 20 pounds in 20 years. It looks like age itself is the problem, but it’s not. It’s that pound a year that caused all the trouble.

Moderation doesn’t work.

In other words, the average 30-year-old who consumes a moderate caloric diet while eating the wrong foods will be 10 pounds heavier by age 40 for what may seem like no reason at all. And if at any point along the way that person tries to lose weight—usually by restricting calories—she’s going to find it very difficult to lose weight, keep it off or both.

Why? Because, you guessed it, your body is not a bank account or a calorimeter. It is a chemistry lab. Eating the wrong foods affects your body’s chemistry. Gaining weight affects your body’s chemistry. Stress and lifestyle changes affect your body’s chemistry. So, if you want to get that extra weight off, you have to
heal
your body’s chemistry.

QUIZ: WHAT ARE YOU TOLERATING?

Are you still not sure whether food intolerance is the cause of your weight gain and premature aging? Take this quiz and find out.

IS FOOD INTOLERANCE HOLDING YOU HOSTAGE?

• If you have one of the symptoms listed below 1 to 2 times a week at a mild or moderate level—even if you barely notice it—score 2 points.
  
• If you have mild or moderate symptoms 3 or more times a week or a severe symptom 2 or more times a week, score 4 points.
  

TOTAL POINTS: _____

Your Food Intolerance Score:

1 to 5: Low-FI

Currently, you seem to suffer from few food allergies or intolerances, if any. I have found that most people feel and look better while removing high-FI foods and often are reacting to one or more of them whether or not they have any overt symptoms. You are reading this book because you want to make sure that you eat the best diet so you can keep feeling and looking lean and young.

6 to 14: Mid-FI

You consistently suffer mild or moderate discomfort and bloating with certain foods, but you do experience periods of relief. Over time, you have probably noticed weight gain even though your diet hasn’t changed. Your skin and hair may look somewhat dull, and you tend to feel more tired or stressed than you used to.

15+: High FI

Help! You can’t remember the last time you felt light and lean after a meal, and it feels as though your stomach is constantly bloated. You’ve done everything you can think of to lose weight, and it just hasn’t worked. Every time you look in the mirror, you think,
How did I get so old? Why do I look so tired?

Okay, so here’s how I like to think of it: food isn’t just calories or fat grams or even a source of energy, food is information. Each bite of food that you put into your mouth sends your body a message—maybe even several messages.

Food isn’t just calories or fat grams or even a source of energy.

Some of these messages relate to your blood sugar and insulin production. Some of them govern
your feelings of hunger and fullness. Others concern your fat burning and metabolism, and still others involve your hair, skin, mood and mental functioning.

This is why I say that not all calories are created equal. You might portion out a cookie, a hamburger and a serving of cauliflower so they all have the same number of calories, but each of those three foods is going to send your body very different messages. And it’s the messages we care about, not just the calories.

Actually, it’s not just
what
you eat that gives your body information. It’s also
how much
you eat at one time,
how fast
you eat,
what combinations
you eat,
how you feel
while you are eating and even
what you drink
with what you eat. Every one of those things is important because each sends your body a message: burn fat or store it; build muscle or lose it; slow the aging process down or speed it up; create steady, sustained energy or crash and burn within the next couple hours. Don’t worry if this sounds complicated: I have laid it all out for you. All you have to do is live by the Virgin Diet Plate and follow my rules of meal timing, and you will be golden. The Virgin Diet is designed to send only the right messages to your body—24/7 for 21 days. I’m betting that you’ll like the feeling so much that you’ll keep sending all the right messages for a long, long time after that.

Not all calories are created equal.

Food allergies are actually rather rare, but they get all the bad press because they are responsible for the really dramatic food problems that
we hear about, such as the child who takes one bite of a peanut and then has to be rushed to the hospital. Food allergies trigger special antibodies in the bloodstream known as immunoglobulin E, or IgE, the most aggressive defense system our bodies have. Among other chemicals, IgE antibodies release large amounts of
histamine,
a substance that causes swelling, mucus, congestion and all the other symptoms that you would normally modify with an
antihistamine.

It’s the swelling reaction that makes food allergies so dangerous. In severe cases, the throat and airways become so swollen that they cut off the air supply, making you unable to breathe.

Even without such deadly responses, however, aggressive IgE antibodies generally produce quick, dramatic reactions, appearing within minutes or even seconds after the offending food is consumed. Other allergic reactions include rashes, hives, itching, eczema, nausea, stomach pain, diarrhea, shortness of breath and chest pain, as well as bloating, nausea, cramping and stomachache. Because much of our immune system is located in the gut, food allergies tend to wreak havoc with digestion.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking,
But I don’t have any of those symptoms, and I feel fine after I eat.
If that’s your response, terrific! You probably don’t have any food allergies. Most people don’t. But most people do have food intolerance, so let’s take a closer look at that.

Food intolerance
is an umbrella term that covers three ways other than food allergies that things can go wrong: true intolerance, food sensitivities and food reactions.

Some people’s bodies simply have trouble tolerating certain foods, such as gluten (found in many grains, pastas, baked goods and processed and prepared foods), lactose (found in dairy products) or MSG (monosodium glutamate, a form of salt used as a flavor enhancer in many processed and prepared foods). Usually, this is because the intolerant people are lacking a specific chemical or enzyme that they need to digest the food. This is simply a genetic problem, and there isn’t much you can do about it except to avoid the foods. The good news is that on the Virgin Diet, you will avoid these difficult foods, which will make it easier for you to lose weight, look younger and feel healthier.

Like allergies, food sensitivities are a type of immune reaction, but they mobilize a different type of antibody than food allergies do—not IgE, but its cousin, immunoglobulin G, or IgG. These IgG antibodies produce symptoms, too, but they act more slowly than IgE antibodies. Whereas allergic reactions are swift, food sensitivity symptoms don’t appear until several hours or even a few days after you’ve eaten, making it very difficult to link them to the problem food.