The Virgin Diet (6 page)

Moderation makes you fat for several different reasons:

• Moderation creates a slippery slope.
  If a little bit is okay, then a little bit more is still okay. The next thing you know, that one cookie turns into two, and that weekly sugary muffin turns into a daily ritual.
  
• Moderation sets you up for cravings.
  If you don’t eat chips, then you won’t think about chips. The minute you eat chips, what do you think about? Eating more chips. That’s one of the things
  I hate about artificial sweeteners: when you eat sweet, you crave sweet. You have a little bit of something, and it makes you want more and more.
  

  We are better off looking at an artificial sweetener and thinking,
  This is toxic. This will hurt me.
  The high-FI foods will hurt you, especially as they accumulate in your system. Plus, we all have trigger foods, and just a little bit of them creates desire. It doesn’t take much to create weight gain.
  

• Moderation sets you up for addiction to foods.
  This is especially true with processed foods, which usually contain gluten, dairy or both. Gluten peptides and the casein peptides in dairy products can react with opiate receptors in the brain, thus mimicking the effects of opiate drugs like heroin and morphine.
  3
  ,
  4
  As a result, they can have a drug-like effect on the brain. Dr. Neal Barnard, author of
  Breaking the Food Seduction: The Hidden Reasons Behind Food Cravings—and 7 Steps to End Them Naturally,
  says:
  

  Cheese, for example, is loaded with casein, a protein that breaks up during digestion to produce morphine-like opiate compounds called casomorphins. These substances are thought to contribute to the mother–infant bond that occurs during nursing. A cup of milk contains about six grams of casein, and skim milk contains a little more, but casein becomes even more concentrated in the production of cheese. So it’s no surprise that many of us feel bonded to our pizzas. Chocolate, sugar, and meat work in slightly different ways, but they all release drug-like substances that seduce the brain into coming back for more.
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  In his book
  The End of Overeating,
  Dr. David Kessler likewise talks about how the sugar/salt/fat combination of most processed foods creates an addiction that makes it virtually impossible to eat these foods in moderation: “Until you have gained the upper hand over trigger foods, an attempt at moderation won’t work.”
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  In other words, if you have a little bit, you will want a little bit more and more.
  

• Moderation allows immune complexes to accumulate.
  Most of us get small amounts of toxins all day every day from food or from what we drink or breathe. No matter the source, what we can’t get rid of will accumulate in our bodies.
  

  It’s the same with food sensitivities. They produce immune complexes, and some of those complexes can accumulate. If you eat a little bit of a high-FI food each day, you are just building up more complexes. That “moderate” consumption over time can create chronic reactions from your gastrointestinal system and your immune system and ultimately impact your weight.
  

• Moderation ignores the serious damage that foods can do.
  If you’re using the bank-account model, you might think,
  Oh, it’s just 100 extra calories each day. What harm could that do?
  But your body is not a bank account, it’s a chemistry lab. Food is not just food, it’s also information. What message is it sending your body? What happens if you add a 100-calorie snack every after-noon to your diet, say, some crackers or a couple cookies?
  

Food is not just food, it’s also information.

You’re not just consuming 100 calories. You’re consuming gluten that can damage your gut, plus sugar that is raising your blood sugar and keeping insulin in your bloodstream. That extra insulin tells your body to store more fat. If the snack was made with any of the 7 high-FI foods—and virtually all processed foods have at least one of those ingredients—you have high-FI foods causing an inflammatory response, which then triggers insulin resistance (making it harder to lose weight), leptin resistance (keeping you hungry even when you’ve had enough) and cortisol resistance (making you feel either more stressed out, more fatigued or both). Then you get cravings from the immune complexes that start to form, and your blood sugar crashes way too soon. You don’t have the right insulin or leptin response keeping you from feeling hungry, and now you want a second snack and a third and a fourth. I’d love to do a study that shows how many people actually stop with one 100-calorie snack.

The bottom line is that moderation is a big part of the problem. Moderation really is making you fat.

I’ve spent a lot of time telling you what not to eat, and most likely you are currently eating most if not all of these 7 foods every day. Almost 90 percent of what the average American eats is processed food, and that processed food usually contains corn, soy or both. Besides corn and soy, most processed foods contain gluten, dairy, eggs, peanuts, sugar or artificial sweeteners. When I tell people to pull these 7 high-FI foods, they ask, “What will I eat?” The truth is, eating and planning meals becomes very simple.

On the Virgin Diet, you may not have as many choices, but the ones you have are great. You eat chicken. You eat turkey. You eat wild fish. You eat grass-fed beef. You drink protein-rich Virgin Diet Shakes. Those are your lean proteins. You eat sweet potatoes, black beans, lentils, legumes, brown rice, quinoa, apples and berries. Those are your high-fiber, low-glycemic starchy carbs. You eat raw nuts and seeds, coconut, avocado, olive oil and palm fruit oil. Those are your healthy fats. You eat loads of nonstarchy vegetables. Without all those processed foods in your system, the subtle flavors of the vegetables and the natural sweetness of the berries start to taste delicious.

You won’t feel hungry. You won’t feel deprived. You’ll just feel better.

You don’t need to spend big money to eat this way. When you don’t buy boxes of crackers, cereal and frozen processed products, you may actually save money. With all the delicious, healthy food you’ll be eating, you won’t feel hungry. And with all the healthy alternatives to the high-FI foods, you won’t feel deprived. You’ll just feel better.

Now, you will need to be vigilant. Over the new few weeks, you will become mindful of exactly what is in your food. It will probably shock you to find out all the places where soy, gluten, dairy and eggs are hidden. You will be astonished to realize how many things are sweetened with sugar or artificial sweeteners. You will be amazed to realize how often peanuts lurk in our food—even in a “healthy” protein bar.

We were never meant to eat the same thing all day every day.

You will think,
Oh my gosh. Who knew that I was eating this stuff all day every day?
We were never meant to eat the same thing all day every day. We were also not meant to have soy and corn in everything we eat.

One of the important things about the Virgin Diet is to help you avoid eating the same highly reactive foods all the time. So, you’re going to rotate your proteins and enjoy a variety of nonstarchy vegetables. However, too much variety and choice can create problems as well—just think
buffet
to understand why.

To keep it simple and easy, you will have my Virgin Diet Plate to use as your guideline. You will always have clean, lean proteins, such as wild-caught fish or organic chicken. You will eat some high-fiber, slow-release carbs. You will eat healthy fats to reduce inflammation. You will eat loads of nonstarchy vegetables.

Once you fall into the pattern, it will be easy for you to stick to the plan. That’s why in
Chapter 11
, instead of a meal plan, which would tell you exactly what to eat each day, I give you The Ultimate Meal Assembly Guide for you to learn how to put together proteins, high-fiber carbs, fats and nonstarchy vegetables into satisfying and healthy combinations. I give you a few key options: the stoup (a cross between stew and soup), the bowl, the salad, the wrap and the plate. I give you lists of healthy foods and show you how to pick the right amounts from each list—and the rest is up to you.

Once you learn how to assemble meals, you will find that eating according to the Virgin Diet is just as easy as the way you eat now. Maybe even easier. And it will almost certainly be less expensive because you won’t be wasting money on processed foods.

In addition to tracking your progress, I also want you to keep a food journal throughout Cycles 1 and 2: a record of what you eat and how you feel every single day. After Cycle 2, you can let it go—unless you feel yourself starting to slip. Tracking is one of the best ways to keep yourself on track. In fact, I think journaling is such an essential part of your success that I “fire” clients who won’t do it. Don’t make me fire you, too!

Why do I want you to keep a food journal? Here are just some of the benefits:

• You can identify what triggers a problem.
  Throughout this book, I’m going to tell you every place that high-FI foods hide, but something might sneak in that you didn’t even know you ate. All of a sudden—especially if this happens at the end of week 2 or during week 3—you feel rotten again. Then you will think,
  What the heck did I do that’s laying me out?
  Remember, food intolerance is sneaky; it might take a few days to show up. If you have tracked every bite in your food journal, then you’ll be much more likely to identify the culprit—and you will have learned something very important about which foods cause you problems.
  
• What you measure, you can improve.
  That’s why I want you to write everything down. I have to laugh when people just write down the good days. No! You must write it
  all
  down.
  
• You can easily forget how much progress you’ve made.
  I definitely want you to track your symptoms and then look back and say, “Wow.” Otherwise, you get through 3 weeks and say,
  

  “I wasn’t feeling that bad.” If you read back through your journal and remember it all—the headaches, the mood swings, the acne, the fatigue—you realize that your old normal and your new normal are miles apart. That gives you motivation to lose the rest of your weight, if you haven’t yet hit your ideal, and it keeps you inspired to make the most of your maintenance plan so this new terrific normal stays that way.
  

  And don’t just take my word for it! Jack Hollis, PhD, is one of the researchers at Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research in Portland, Oregon, on one of the largest and longest-running weight-loss maintenance trials ever conducted. The trial has shown that the more food records people kept, the more weight they lost. As Dr. Hollis reported, “Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. It seems that the simple act of writing down what you eat encourages people to consume fewer calories.”
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Check out a sample journal page you can download from my website at www.thevirgindiet.com/journal.

This exercise is for those times when you need just a little bit more motivation. There will always be naysayers and doubters who may try to drag you down. You know who they are: the friends who tell you that weight gain is unavoidable, that your metabolism slows as you get older, that you shouldn’t even dream of fitting into those jeans from high school.

Well, don’t listen to them! Sure, if you are 5 feet tall with a larger frame, you won’t ever be 6 foot tall and petite. That’s not realistic. But you
can
be the best you’ve ever been in your life
at any point in your life
if you make the decision and focus on what you need to do to get there.

So let’s get inspired. Let’s set some goals that will stretch you and motivate you. You need goals that will get you excited enough to get off the couch and do what you need to do. You need to build a case for why you need to be doing this. What are the things that you want to have?

Let’s set some goals that will stretch you and motivate you.

Do you want to have great energy in the afternoon? Do you want to be able to wear a bikini at the beach and not feel self-conscious? Do you want to go to your high school reunion and feel like you’re a rock star? Do you want to do sports with your kids? I take my kids to the gym, and they can’t even keep up with me. Is that something you want in your life, too? Do you want to be able to zip up anything in your closet, have no cravings, get rid of headaches, never get sick and have great energy? What goals would make it worth it for you to totally take on the Virgin Diet?

Let’s make a checklist. I want to know your top three goals for joining this program. Write them down. I want you to look at your checklist and see what success looks like for you. Is it being a size 8? Is it great energy? Is it no headaches? Is it to stop getting sick or stop having joint pain? Is it to lose the cravings?

Now I’d like you to make a list of your top three costs. What does it cost you if you
don’t
do this program? Where are you right now? What’s not working? Here’s the reality: unless you make a change, your life is not going to get any better. You don’t get better unless you do better. You don’t get better if you don’t change. Imagine if this is as good as it gets. What opportunities will you miss out on by not taking action? What are
you sacrificing in terms of your career, your relationships, your happiness and your health?

You have to figure out what is most motivating to you. Some people are motivated by pleasure. Most people are more motivated by avoiding pain. It might be the pain of hurting all the time, not being able to think straight, being tired or not being able to do the things you really want to do because food is creating inflammation and getting in your way. Whatever your costs are, know that if you don’t maintain the Virgin Diet, food will take you down.