The Virgin Diet (19 page)

By this point, you’ve come to see that health is a dynamic process. You can create leaky gut and then heal it. You can tolerate something for a while and then build up immune complexes that set up intolerance. You can eat something when your life is going well and then develop problems under stress. Our bodies are always changing, just as our lives are. You have to be prepared for this.

I’m so proud of you for making it to Cycle 3! But I don’t want you to assume that you’re done and that there is nothing more to discover about your health. You might be able to tolerate dairy or eggs now, but that doesn’t mean you can do so next year—or vice versa. So, I recommend moving through Cycles 1, 2 and 3 once a year, every year, for the rest of your life. You can choose whichever time of year works best for you, but I often find this works well as a “new year, new you” program, in the spring to get ready for summer or in the fall after too much summer vacation. If you have developed some food intolerances, you might see rapid fat loss again in Cycle 1. And if you have some weight to lose, focusing on your food quality and quantity and going back to journaling is definitely going to help.

When you go back through the cycles, you may have some surprises, which might possibly work both ways. Something you could never eat turns into a food you tolerate. Something you could always eat turns into a food you can’t tolerate. This isn’t me trying to trip you up, this is the way your body works. I’m trying to set you up for success by sharing this knowledge with you and encouraging you to take charge of your own health. If you’d rather spend the money, you can go to a functional doctor or naturopath and get tested for food sensitivities once a year. But I’d rather you do this program because then you are most closely in
touch with your own body and your own responses. Practitioners will mainly test you for IgG sensitivies, but there are other ways that your body might react poorly to food. That’s why I find that the very best test is the elimination diet. The sense of power you get from doing that will spill over into the rest of your life. I promise you, there is nothing like it.

THE VIRGIN DIET: THE LIFETIME PROGRAM

• At least 95 percent of the time, avoid sugar, fruit juices and high-glycemic juices, corn, soy and peanuts. Follow the “three
  polite
  bites” rule the other 5 percent of the time. Avoid artificial sweeteners 100 percent of the time.
  
• If you can tolerate them, include healthy forms of eggs and dairy based on how you did in Cycle 2: If you had no reaction, you can eat them every other day. If you had a reaction by the fourth day, you can eat them every 4 days. If you reacted immediately, leave them out for at least 3 months.
  
• Once every 3 months, feel free to rechallenge the foods you cannot tolerate. Go back to
  Chapter 9
  and repeat any or all of the gluten, soy, egg or dairy challenges.
  This is optional.
  
• Once every 12 months, go back to
  Chapter 8
  and repeat the 21 days of the Virgin Diet, then move on to
  Chapter 9
  and rechallenge any or all of the 4 foods.
  This is a necessity. You must do it every year.
  

A recent study showed that people at a healthy weight who ate moderately were likely to gain 10 pounds in 10 years. Just 1 pound per year can make the difference between zipping up your jeans and having to buy a new pair—or the difference between feeling old, overweight and unattractive versus facing middle age with lots of vitality, sparkle and confidence in your fit and glowing body.

I have to work hard at staying in shape and staying on the program, just like you do.

I am not just saying this to you, I am saying it to myself. Believe it or not, I have to work hard at staying in shape and staying on the program, just like you do. There was a time in my life when I found that I had gained 10 pounds, my waistline had thickened, my skin was breaking out and I felt foggy and under par. Slowly but surely, I was feeling the effects of my beloved whey shakes, goat cheese omelets, sourdough bread and that inch of foamy milk on my cafè Americano. When I cut out eggs, dairy and gluten, the weight came off, my skin cleared up and my mental sharpness returned. I had learned my lesson. Now I want to share it with you. As long as I stay on the program, I never have to think about my weight. It is so liberating to never have to worry about my weight or if my pants are going to zip up. After all, weight loss shouldn’t be a hobby.

So, how do we guard against the dangers of moderation? Here are the tips I’ve figured out for myself. I know they will work for you, too.

• Weigh and measure yourself once a week.
  We always want to get on the scale when we know we’re in great shape and avoid it when we’ve slipped. Nope. That is setting yourself up for failure,
  and I want you to set yourself up for success. Weigh in weekly—pick the same time of day so the figure is meaningful—and write down the weight in your food journal. Compare the number with your last three weights. Are you staying the same, going down or going up? Be honest—and take action. (For an easy measurement record you can use to track your weight and measurements, go to www.thevirgindiet.com/weighttracker.
  
• Write it down.
  You don’t have to keep a food journal in Cycle 3 the way you did in Cycles 1 and 2, but I can tell you that when I know I’ve slipped—when I’ve eaten more than three polite bites of something or indulged in a food that I know I can’t tolerate—I get out the journal that night and track myself for the next week. I want to know if I have got symptoms creeping in, and I want to take action if I do. If you feel like you’re falling off the food wagon or if you notice symptoms—acne, rosacea, gas, bloating, indigestion, fatigue, mental fog or crankiness—go back to journaling. Clean up your diet. Cut out dairy, eggs, gluten and soy for a couple weeks. Make sure you’re staying hydrated. Stick extra closely to the Golden Rules of Meal Timing. Be vigilant about your daily shake and about your meal assembly with all the right ingredients.
  
• Be accountable to someone.
  Hire a coach, join an online support group or get a friend to become your accountability buddy. You need someone or some group that will hold you to your commitment. I do, you do, we all do.
  
• Keep your eye on the prize.
  Continue to up-level your inspired goals to keep you motivated and on the straight and narrow.
  
• Get at least 7 to 9 hours of good sleep each night.
  Be aware that suboptimal sleep—either not enough or not under the right conditions—can totally sabotage your weight, not to mention the rest of your health. This isn’t just a matter of “it would be nice if.…” Sleep is essential.
  Insufficient sleep will make you fat.
  

Here’s the great thing: you can make tiny shifts that you don’t even notice to help you eat and drink less. Although I want you drinking lots of water when you’re not eating, remember that you need to restrict fluids while you eat.

Here is something that I do at my house. I use small, pretty plates, and I insist that everyone sit down to eat. I have two boys, so there was basically a frat house in my kitchen. I realized that with all the standing and grabbing, it was easy to overeat. When we sat down and used our pretty plates—and the nice skinny glasses that I bought to go with them—it was much easier to feel full and satisfied. When you pay attention to food, it tastes better, and your satiety goes up. If your mind is elsewhere, you keep eating mindlessly.

When you pay attention to food, it tastes better, and your satiety goes up.

The following are a few other tips for becoming conscious of when, where, how and how much you eat. A lot of these ideas came from my hero, Brian Wansink, a Nobel Prize–winning expert in consumer behavior and nutritional science. (I’ve listed his fabulous book in the Sources section.)

• Follow the Golden Rules of Meal Timing.
  They’ll keep you from being hungry so you’re a lot less likely to feel like overeating. (See pages 172–173 if you want to review them.)
  
• No bedtime snacks.
  If you eat before bed, you can suppress the human growth hormone, which is key for improving your metabolism and burning fat. More important, if you ate your balanced dinner and followed your meal plan throughout the day, you’re probably not hungry—just bored or thirsty. Give yourself a nonfood treat or have a glass of water. You shouldn’t go to sleep with a full belly. Ghrelin—released when your stomach is empty—triggers in turn the release of the growth hormone, which helps you build muscle, speed up your metabolism and burn fat.
  
• Drink 8 ounces of water in the evening.
  A University of Washington study showed this will help shut down your hunger pangs.
  31
  
• Stay hydrated throughout the day.
  When you get hungry, ask yourself,
  Is this hunger or thirst?
  You’ll be surprised at how often it’s thirst!
  
• Go for the fiber.
  Remember to bring your fiber intake up slowly and to drink lots of water as you do so to give your body time to adjust. When you’re eating your optimal daily fiber of 50 grams, you get a feeling of fullness that lasts for a long time.
  
• Know your triggers and avoid them.
  Don’t have food on your shelves that will tempt you to eat between meals or overeat. If you can’t buy food in small quantities (e.g., chocolate), freeze
  it in individual portion sizes so you have to defrost it before you eat. That way, you won’t be as likely to eat on impulse.
  
• Put away leftovers before you start eating.
  You can’t have seconds if the food is already stored in the fridge and cold before you’ve finished your firsts.
  
• Write down
  everything
  you eat.
  That way, you won’t be nearly as tempted to cheat.
  
• Put your fork down between every bite.
  Nothing is better for helping you pay attention to each bite.
  
• Use chopsticks.
  This will also slow you down.
  
• Weigh and measure to relearn portions.
  Your own judgment will be out of whack for a few weeks, so use external measures until you’ve internalized them.
  
• Dine with slow eaters.
  You will tend to follow their rhythm, which means you’ll stop being hungry a lot sooner.
  

I personally use these tips all the time, so I’m psyched to share them with you. You don’t have to start them all at the same time. Try adding one each week until they all become second nature.

If you are not at your ideal weight yet, don’t worry. If you stick to the Virgin Diet, you will find that you will continue to lose weight until you reach your ideal body composition. Just keep out sugar, corn, peanuts, gluten and soy 95 percent of the time and only eat dairy and eggs to the extent you can tolerate them based on your results in Cycle 2.

Be sure to continue journaling during this time. If you find that your weight loss stalls, be sure to incorporate the long-term strategies including burst training and resistance exercise, good sleep and stress management.

While you are actively working on weight loss, don’t have even three bites of a forbidden food and limit your alcohol intake. You can also go back to two shakes a day to accelerate your weight loss.

If you are doing everything right and get “stuck,” it is time to visit a functional medicine practitioner (see the Resources section on my website) to get evaluated for weight-loss resistance due to other factors, including gastrointestinal issues (small intestine bacterial overgrowth, yeast, parasites), thyroid disease, insulin or leptin resistance, toxicity and sex hormone imbalances.

One of the best ways that you can maintain your ideal weight—and also stay healthy, energized and fit—is to exercise. Although exercise isn’t so important for losing weight, studies have shown that it is absolutely crucial for maintaining weight.
32
,
33
If you’ve already been working out, doing cardio or moving a lot, congratulations! Keep it up or bump it up.
If you have been fairly sedentary up to this point, now is the time to get yourself in gear.

You won’t necessarily go from sitting on the couch all day to achieving your ideal fitness. But you can do it gradually, through a three-step process:

1. Move more.
   
2. Start burst-style training.
   
3. Add resistance training.
   

You’ve got to start from where you are. So no matter how little you’ve done up to this point, start by moving just 5 minutes per day. Take a brisk walk, walk up some stairs instead of taking the elevator, jump on your kid’s bike—find some way to move even a little bit. At the end of the first week, add 5 more minutes to make it 10. Keep adding 5 minutes every week until you get up to an hour of physical activity per day.

Remember, moving is a part of life. We are supposed to move. Sometimes you have to make an effort, though, especially if you live in the suburbs or in someplace like southern California, which is where I happen to live. Hey, no one walks in southern California. We even have valet parking at the airport.

That is not acceptable to me, so thankfully I have a little dog. That helps me a lot because I have to walk her at least 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at night. I make a point of parking farther away so every time I get out of my car, I move for 5 minutes before reaching my destination. I find excuses to take the stairs. If I’m in a place like Las Vegas with 40 flights of stairs, there’s my exercise—stair workouts. I definitely would rather do that than pay an arm and a leg to use the fitness room.

Now, what do I mean when I say you need to get moving for an hour a day? Eventually, you’ll carve out some of that time for burst-style exercise and resistance training. But if you’re new to this, you’ll probably want to start out by walking and finding other ways to incorporate movement and physical activity into your life. Don’t worry, you don’t have to take an hour walk each day. Instead, think of little places to work in 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. Get a pedometer and find out how much you are actually moving. Then, gradually work your way up to 6,000 or more steps a day. (Did you know that a pedometer is one of the five top tools for weight loss? The other four are a journal, a scale, fiber and water, which you’re already on top of! For information on where to find a pedometer, see the Resources section on my website.) The great news is that every step you take counts, so even going to the kitchen to get a glass of water gives you a boost on your way to your daily goal.