most common include bloating, wind, indigestion, fatigue, mental fog, irritability, moodiness – and weight gain. If you’re eating foods that your body can’t tolerate, you’re likely to gain weight, feel crummy and look years older than your actual age.
Most people ignore their bodies’ responses to the foods they eat, or maybe they search for ways to mask the symptoms. But weight gain, bloating and fatigue are not just annoying facts of life. They are your body’s way of telling you that you’re eating foods that aren’t working for you. Until you get rid of the foods that your body can’t handle, load up on healing foods and supplements and give your body a chance to recover from what you’ve unknowingly put it through, you are likely to gain weight, retain weight and suffer from premature ageing. Not a pretty picture.
Maybe your body is stressed because of your daily diet’s high content of sugar, artificial sweeteners and processed foods, which tend to contain lots of high-FI soy, corn and gluten. Or perhaps you’ve maintained a seemingly healthy natural, low-fat and low-carb regime but have never realized that all of your healthy efforts are being sabotaged by high-FI yoghurt (even nonfat), eggs (even omega-3-rich) and grains (even whole). Either way, if you weigh more than you’d like and look older than you’d prefer, you are most likely struggling with food intolerances.
How can you tell? Let me ask you what I ask my clients:
Have you tried unsuccessfully to lose weight?
Is what you used to do to lose weight no longer working?
Are you a yo-yo dieter?
Do you frequently experience discomfort after eating, such as bloating, wind or indigestion?
Can you only lose weight by starving yourself or exercising like a maniac – or possibly not even then?
Are you feeling and looking older than you should?
If the answer to even one of these questions is yes, you’ve likely been eating too many high-FI foods: problem foods that are likely to trigger food intolerance. What’s the solution? Stop eating high-FI foods and replace them with low-FI foods: foods that are unlikely to trigger food intolerance. If you can cut out the top 7 high-FI foods for just 3 weeks, you’ll see weight loss and beauty results that will have you looking and feeling terrific.
Hey, if those old low-fat, low-carb or high-protein diets had worked for you in the past, you’d already be at your ideal weight and peak vitality, right? There’s a reason that approach to food doesn’t work – and there’s a reason that the Virgin Diet does.
I often joke that most of my clients are allergic to diets. And in a way, they are, because most of the foods that people eat when they diet – egg whites, nonfat yoghurt, tofu – can set off food intolerance that keeps the weight on, even when you cut the calories.
The ‘allergic’ part is my joke, because food intolerance and food allergies are not actually the same thing. However, they are very closely related. They’re both responses to an apparently harmless or maybe even a healthy food that can involve one or more of your body’s systems, including your digestive system and your immune system. High-FI foods not only make you feel tired, unfocused and moody, but they’re also the hidden cause of weight gain, weight-loss resistance and premature ageing.
The good news here is that your fat is not your fault. It’s your body’s way of responding to the foods it can’t handle – foods you may have been eating precisely because you thought they were good for you!
Luckily, there is a solution: the three-week Virgin Diet solution. For just 21 days:
Stop eating the 7 major high-FI foods.
Focus on low-FI foods that will give your digestive system a break.
Load up with healing foods and healing supplements to repair the damage.
Right away, you’ll lose the bloat, finally start losing weight and look years younger. You’ll look and feel so terrific that you might even make some lifelong changes in your diet.
Food intolerance isn’t a fixed condition; it’s more like a dynamic response. Foods that you were able to tolerate a few years ago might be problematic for you now. If you clean high-FI foods out of your system and take some other healing steps – all of which I’ll walk you through – then you may eventually be able to eat foods that are causing problems for you now.
The first step, though, is to get those high-FI foods out of your system and give your body a chance to chill out. After a 21-day break, I’ll have you add some of the healthier high-FI foods back into your diet, and we’ll find out if you can tolerate them. If you can’t handle them right away, you may be able to in 3 months, or 6 months or perhaps a year. But before we can add them back in, we have to take them out.
A lot of my clients are sceptical about this elimination process, at least at first. They just can’t believe that such apparently healthy foods as yoghurt, whole grains and edamame are causing such severe problems, especially when they don’t cause any noticeable ill effects after eating them. That’s because food intolerance is such a subtle reaction. Allergies are swifter and more dramatic. A peanut allergy can strike after one tiny bite of peanut. Your throat closes up, you can hardly breathe and the conclusion is pretty clear: stay away from peanuts.
Food intolerance is sneakier. If you enjoy a delicious bowl of nonfat yoghurt and berries today and break out in acne 2 days later, you’re unlikely to make the connection – but I’m betting that it’s there. (See Chapter 5 for more information on the strong link between dairy and acne.) Likewise, if you have some whole-grain cereal this morning, you might not even realize that it’s the cause of your fitful sleep tonight. You probably won’t realize it until you eliminate gluten for a few weeks and start sleeping like a baby.
Like I said, high-FI foods are sneaky. They work slowly, subtly and after long delays. The only way to find out how they’re affecting you is to cut them out for at least 21 days. If your skin clears up, your hair perks up and your energy levels rise, maybe we’re onto something here. And if you drop up to 7 pounds in 7 days, I think you might say that we’ve figured out your problem.
Allergy specialists are quite familiar with elimination diets: food regimens in which a possibly offending food is removed from your diet and then gradually reintroduced a few weeks later. If you can introduce the problem food easily, then you either weren’t allergic to it or you’ve moved past the allergy. If reintroduction causes symptoms to flare up, then you’ve found a food that your body can’t handle, at least not right now.
The Virgin Diet works the same way. We take out the foods that might be causing you problems. We will then reintroduce some high-FI foods – eggs, dairy, soy and gluten – back into your diet. If you tolerate them well, terrific! If you show symptoms, out they go. You can give them another try in 3, 6 or 12 months when your system has had more time to heal and recover. I am going to encourage you to keep the sugar, artificial sweeteners, corn
