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Bonus: JJ Virgin – Sexy and Scientific Simultaneously


Jonathan: Hey everyone Jonathan Bailor here, very, very excited about today’s bonus Smarter Science of Slim podcast because we have just a wonderful woman and an amazing New York Times bestselling author who is really doing some great work to help redefine what we think of when we think of food intolerance, and really showing how this can be at a heart of a lot of the struggles we all face despite how much of the traditional starve ourselves and then spend hours on the stair-stepper model approach we take.

A much more SANE approach here is just a wonderful vibrant woman who does and represents and lives what she says. We have none other than the New York Times bestselling author of the Virgin Diet, JJ Virgin, welcome to the show.

JJ: Thank you so much. It’s such an honor, am quite your biggest fan, so…

Jonathan: Well, the feeling is definitely mutual JJ and I really, really quickly, I want to get into your story but the first thing that I want to cover is the thing that you do so well, is you have like your awesome seven pounds in seven days with seven foods and it’s so catchy and its awesome but there’s also this very deep layer of the science and awesome substance below that. Before we get in to your story and just all this great work you’re doing, you have the ability to communicate to science so sexily and I appreciate that.

JJ: Sexily? Well, you know what, one of the things I saw early on, I had been working on with doctors and practice development for the last 15 years and I realized this early on in my own career when I was a personal trainer, it was me and Body by Jake. I went, that guy is fully booked and charging three times what I’m charging and I know all the science and I’m telling them the science. You know what, people buy results and you have to be all to communicate it in a way that’s grabby, catchy etc., otherwise, they won’t do it.

The science has got to be there, although you and I both know that there is some amazing science out there that doesn’t work that you can use a study to proof anything. I’ve been deep into sugar lately and it’s amazing how they’ve overlooked things to say that sugar in high fructose corn syrup is safe. We can use science to proof anything, so you’ve is going to take science plus real life experiments, which is using our own body as chemistry labs to show things and then you’ve got to package it up in a way that the consumer goes “oh this is awesome and I can do it,” because if they can’t and they aren’t intrigued and want to do it and then they can’t see themselves being able to do it, we all lose.

Jonathan: Absolutely, absolutely and let’s dig into that a little bit, what the pitch that you have which is so awesome and so backed by science and so backed by results, is that there are essentially at least starting with seven foods, which can help you to lose seven pounds if you eliminate them in seven days and that is because this really is not about calorie math and of course they matter but it’s really about the quality of food we’re eating and how some foods literally are not compatible with our body. You talked about that a little bit

JJ: That was poetic, I don’t need to say anymore. You’re doing all my interviews from here on out. What I tell people is yes calories count but where they come from counts so much more so you want to think of food as information and realize that when you’re eating things, you want the message from your food to say “Hey, reduce inflammation, slow down the aging process, keep my energy level consistent, let insulin come up to tell you you’re not hungry anymore but then, come back down to fasting, so that your body can open the doors to fat cells and use stored fat for sustained energy rather than relying on sugar and making you bonk all the time and eat food.”

That’s the real crust of it is that yes, it’s the 777 but what happened was I was doing testing in doctor’s offices for food sensitivity, because my whole background is weight loss resistance. I realized like 30 years ago that this calories in, calories models is just stupid and I started saying it and people, I got so attacked, can you imagine that Jonathan?

Jonathan: I know, I can imagine it. I’m sure you go, what was it, who was it, where’s the gentleman who proposed that the earth wasn’t flat or Galileo, when he was like “Oh, the earth isn’t it flat.” They were like, we will burn you at the stake but that’s alright continue. No ones burning you.

JJ: I really should be happy this wasn’t 1,000 years ago, I just stop hyping up about this, I would have been a witch hunted. Anyway, I started going now, what in the world, I was working with clients, and things wasn’t working, so I went, okay, they’re not going to pay me if I’m helping me them gain weight slowly over time, that’s not what they signed up for, so like let’s figure out what’s getting in the way of their weight loss. Obviously, the first place we noticed was losing weight, diets where it all starts, that’s not the end all be all.
I’m not going to say it’s only diets because if you’ve managed to tweak your metabolism, which pretty much everybody has, there’s more to it but luckily a lot of the diet fixes, fix a lot of the other stuff too, like bringing your hormones into balance and so I started doing a simple food sensitivity test.

One way your body can become intolerant to food one, only one of the ways and what I discovered was the same foods, we were really doing that more because people where tired and their joints hurt and their skin broke out and they looked old and they were moody. They had gas and bloating and so we were doing for all these issues but it was funny because a couple things where just classic and always happened.

Number one, the same foods always showed up on the test and in 70 percent of the time in this specific test because this is only one way to look at the three different ways we can become intolerant to food and I don’t believe we even know all the different ways to test for it at this point. The best test is your own chemistry lab, your body, but the same foods always showed up.

I loved that when it happens because 70 percent of the time you see these foods and when you pulled them out you’re the freaking hero because people symptoms went the way like that but they lost weight fast. Jonathan, I’d like to say I was a smarty pants because a couple of months ago, good foundation for a diet but no, that was not the case. I kept thinking you had the test even though the same foods showed up and I didn’t put it together as the foundation of the diet.

I was really using it more to help them be compliant and one day, someone tweeted at me, a chef tweeted at me and says “What are you doing, I keep hearing about you,” and I go “Oh, I’m doing this thing where I’m pulling these foods out because of these tests but I need a recipe.” She said, “do it for me. Let’s do it for our group” and “I’m thinking how I do this testing for 1,000 people at once, what a nightmare.”

What if we just didn’t test, what if we just pulled out the top foods and then she said, “Hey, there’s out layers out there, I picked seven foods, I didn’t pick them arbitrarily but I also kind of looked at them when dropped 10 foods, which we played around with, drops 20 foods but at some point, you’re like “are you kidding me?” I really said, I really narrowed it down to what do I absolutely have to drop and believe me, I went back and forth on a couple of them, but I couldn’t…
These are one’s to go no matter what and it doesn’t mean that they have to go forever because if you told someone drop seven foods, lose seven pounds and get them out of your life forever, they’d never pick up the book but I say hey, we’re going to pull these foods out. The reason we say seven pounds in seven days is that the average, I see people lose, some people lost two pounds and some people lose… I’ve seen some people lose, I think like 13 or 14 and because it’s rapidly reducing inflammation, that’s how it’s doing it but the deal is, you do it for three weeks.

You let your immune system cool off and at the end of three weeks then we go we check it out and we say okay of these seven foods, the top four high-fire, high food intolerance foods, foods that are most likely things that really could cause problems for the long-term because the other three foods honestly, I tell people those don’t have a place in your healthy diet. Those are corn, peanuts, artificial sweeteners and more five grams of added sugar. The four top high five foods, which are gluten, dairy, eggs, and soy we’re going to check that one out and see which work for you and which don’t because for a lot of people, eggs were a tough one for me.

To me, they’re like nature’s perfect food and that’s the case 5,000 years ago but they’re no longer nature’s perfect food because man got involved and I had to go through a whole thing, and go, what the heck does chicken eat because I’m sure it’s not GMO, corn, and soy, so at the end of three weeks, we checked it out and we say, which of these foods help you and which hurt you? So often, we’re eating these foods every day, egg white omelets, and soymilk, and whole grain muffin, because whole grain goodness is so good for you and egg white omelets and Greek style yogurt, and we’re doing that, not because we like it but because we heard that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.

It’s so interesting because just a little bit, this is why moderation is a myth, a little bit of these foods on a regular basis creates this whole intolerant response that creates inflammation, makes you crave the very food that’s hurting you and it can make you weight loss resistant by creating the inflammation that makes you hormonally resistant, cranks up your cortisol, makes you store fat, it’s just a mess. At the end of three weeks, we go back and challenge and I’ll tell you, the toughest part I have with this whole program is that at the end of three weeks, no one wants to go back and challenge. They just don’t want to do it.

That’s the idea, and I personally would love to see people keep these seven out 90 percent or more of the time for life but what we have to find out at the end of three weeks is how much does gluten have to stay in your diet? If you eat gluten and you double over in stomach pain you want to know that at home, not in Las Vegas. I always say that because that I did the egg challenge in Las Vegas, and ended up doubled over in stomach pains, that was stupid. I know better.

Jonathan: What are those, I don’t want to give away the store so certainly folks, you are not like JJ’s book is not, here’s the seven foods, move on. There’s a bunch more of this, so I hope I’m not over stepping my bounds in saying…

JJ: I can tell them. Let’s figure that a ton of people will listen to this interview, some people will want to go grab the book, thank you so much and some people will put it into action without and whatever you need to do, let’s just go change the world. I just want to get the information out there.

My goal is to have a million people do this year and what I see is people do this, they become ambassadors because they can change so fast. Literally, I have a Grammy Award winning singer on this right now and I can’t say her name yet because she is about to come out with it on a reality show but she’s like ‘my fellow singer think I got a tummy tuck.’ Hilarious but other people start doing what they do because it’s actually very simple. Most of the programs out there are very complicated, count this and what category is that and you’re like “Oh gosh, this is this simple.”

Seven foods pull them out; gluten, dairy, egg, soy, corn, peanuts and I lumped sugars and artificial sweeteners together but, seriously, artificial sweeteners, they need to go forever away, bye bye, they’re the worst thing on the planet, I mean hideous. Hit the road. We have you pull them out but the thing that makes this work so well is if I just say, ‘hey pull those things out and have a nice day.’ People are like, “What the heck do I eat? What do I eat?” What we’ve done is we’ve gone through with each category, explained what the problems are.

Now, we start this whole thing with the symptoms test. I think one of the most powerful things that we don’t do is connect the dots of what we’re eating, how we’re feeling and what we weigh. I know that if I eat gluten, my fingers are just swollen the next day. If I eat dairy, I get like a monster, let’s hang around on my face forever zit two days later. I know what these things do to me, and that makes me look at it a pizza in a very different way. It’s like now pizza is the enemy. We connect the dots by doing a symptoms test, pulling these foods out for three weeks, giving you simple swaps, so if you’re putting soy milk in your coffee, you can use almond milk.

If you are doing Greek style yogurt, you can use coconut yogurt. If you’re doing Agave, you can switch to Lohan sweeteners so, here’s what you should do. What I find so often in fact, 99 percent of the time is the first three or four days are brutal. People are angry because they miss those foods. I always tell people, I’m a parent so it’s all on how you frame things. I would say that’s so great because if you’re feeling that way, that means, that you really had an intolerance to those food because an intolerance tends to set up the cravings.

Jonathan: Absolutely. I always tell people if you doubt these foods are addictive, try to give them up and you’ll prove it to yourself very quickly.

JJ: That’s the thing people do the one boo boo people do on dieting. ‘Okay. Gluten, check I can do that. Soy, I can do that, peanuts, corn, alright eggs fine, cheese, no, I have to keep that one in, so all I do, I’ll drop six foods,’ and I go ‘no, no, no, nope.’ It’s whatever one your gone I can do all of those except that one. That’s the kryptonite, that’s the one and you can’t sit down on seven tacks. Get up, pull up six tacks off the chairs, sit back down and have a butt that doesn’t hurt.

Jonathan: I love it, absolutely.

JJ: They all go and I think it’s very powerful because there has been people emailing me going ‘well you know’, because alcohol gets lumped in there with the sugar obviously for three weeks and they’re like, ‘I don’t want to give up my alcohol.’ Now, if you can’t give up your glass of wine for three weeks, I think you have a problem. I know that’s not going to make me popular and I love wine like the rest of them but it’s not something that I do at home by myself and it’s not something that if I ever feel like, “Hey, I can’t go a day without a glass of wine,” I’d better be able to go a week without a glass of wine, two weeks, three weeks, otherwise, there is something whackadoodle there.

Jonathan: Absolutely and JJ, what I love about what you’re describing here is, which again, I think such a powerful and empowering paradigm shift is that the answer is not just to take your existing style of eating, which likely includes heavy doses of especially the gluten, artificial and natural added sweeteners and just eating globally less of everything, just take the tacks and make them smaller tacks and that’s the answer. No, no, no, that’s doubly bad because now you spend a bunch of time trying to shrink the tacks and now your butt still hurts and you’re like, well, I might as well just give up completely.

I’ve tried and it didn’t work so now I know it’s hopeless and in fact I’m going to feel badly about myself because I feel I’m broken. Now, I’m going to get into this self fulfilling cycle of negative self talk, where if you focus on food quality, meaning these food, it’s amazing. I think there is a cultural shift taking place, you’ve identified these seven categories, which many of which of them overlap with the Paleo type effort, many of them overlap with the a lower carb type effort, many of which, you can see our culture is shifting to say food isn’t evil, it’s just that not everything that’s edible is good for everybody and that is such a key and powerful distinction because now, we can love food again. Let’s just eat the foods that support our body and that is unique… There’s definitely some commonalities, certainly a lot of commonalities but let’s focus on what we’re eating and let the wisdom of our body speak to us, rather than trying to overpower our body through starvation.

JJ: Like that works every time. It’s consistently works we just should all be insane and continue to do this thing that does not work but do more with it. Now, I do believe though that there are foods that are evil. I do believe there’s food that’s non-food. I remember back, I’ve been this at this a long time but I remember going to the store and I bought a lot of diet Coke.

I was a total diet Coke fan and I bought all this diet popcorn and I remember looking at my cart and I was spending a freaking fortune on this stuff and these Alba 77 shakes to buy, I was spending all this money to get no calories. I said, wait a minute, it’s like the less calories, the more expensive it is. You’re getting nothing. You want to buy really high quality calories.

Jonathan: I had the same JJ, great minds maybe here because I was in the office the other day and I was looking at the vending machine, not personally because I was going to get something from it, I was brewing some green tea but I saw that there are some options identified as low calorie and they were all these puffed crips and I was like how in the heck, if I’m hungry and I ate a 100 calories of puffed crisp… I should just eat Kleenex, that’s not, what is that possibly going to do to help me not to be hungry.

JJ: The funniest part is you eat that little puff crisps, I always love when people say you should snack all day long. I go, really? Let’s look at that because I bet you’re not snacking on wild salmon or grass-fed beef, I’m just betting you’ve got those 100 calorie snack pack snacking on and they’re basically carbs with a little fat, a great combination. Let’s put some damaged fats and some carbs together, not even good fats and then let’s eat that all throughout the day so your blood sugar going to come up, your insulin’s going to come up, your fat source stores is going to get locked and you’re going to need more sugar soon.

We’ve turned people, I always like to say, you should be a hybrid. You could use sugar as you need to and your explosive exercise which you want to do and for your brain, but you can burn, you want to burn fat as your primary source. Now, you don’t want to be some old guzzling car like that just has to run on sugar and the minute you start to run out, just a little bit, you need another 100 calorie snack pack.

Jonathan: Absolutely and that’s its…JJ, one of the key things, one of the key myths that we’re battling here, I think, is eating fat makes you fat and the challenge is, if you just look out the window, it makes sense that the earth is flat, except that the earth isn’t flat once you have a basic understanding of the way that works but it makes sense on the surface, otherwise we’d fall off. The concept of if you eat fat, it makes you fat, on the surface, if you have no knowledge of human biology, it kind of makes that, you eat fat and it makes you fat. I’m trying to think of a similarly simple and immediately intuitive way to describe what eating fat actually does and tell me, what you think about this. Eating fat makes your body good at burning fat.

JJ: I think, there’s a really, really good analogy in the exercise world that I always try to explain to people. If you’re doing all this stuff during the exercise that burns the higher percentage of fat, then your body is going to want to be able to store more fat back so that it had it ready for the next exercise session. If you’re doing high intensity exercise that uses more sugar and also gets rid of those enzymes that helps you store fat, after the exercise, your body is going to want to store sugar in your muscles because they’re empty.

Their little suitcases of energy are empty and it will not have the enzymes to store fat around because your body burn them off. To me, it’s the same, if you give your body a lot of something, it’s going then to figure out what should I be doing. If you’re giving it a lot of fat, it’s going to say, I’ve got to get really good at burning this off, a lot of sugar, I’ve got to figure out what the heck I‘m going to do with this. Must be a famine, he’s eating all this sugar.

Jonathan: Just to impact that JJ, to get a little bit deeper into the biology for our listeners. We talked about I eat sugar, I get used to burning sugar. I eat fat, I get used to burning fat. Let’s imagine we’re eating fat. Our bodies are getting used to burning fats and let’s say we ate 300 calories worth of fats and let’s say our body has burned that off and now needs additional energy. Our body could think we’re starving but why would it if we still have fat available, which many of us do. It just happens to be sitting on our hips, rather than having just passed through our lips.

If our body is already used to burning fat, it does not necessarily say, ‘Oh my God I’m starving, I’m going to slow down and I’m going to burn out muscle tissue’, it’s just going to say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s more fat over there. I’m going to go burn that because I’m good at burning fat.’ If we’re eating these 100 calorie snack packs and conditioning our body to burn sugar… Let’s say we ate 300 calories worth of sugar, let’s say we burn through that, our bodies like I need more sugar, it’s looking around, our body does not store sugar, it does but not for all intensive purposes what we’re talking about here. It’s looking around and it sees fat but it does not see sugar, so it says ‘Well I want more sugar so I’m going to give you all of these crazy carb cravings versus going after that stored fat,’ because its preferred fuel source is sugar, so it demands that preferred fuel source but by eating fat and conditioning our body to prefer burning fat as fuel even if we don’t have enough external energy, we’ve got plenty of internal energy in the form of stored body fat.

JJ: The thing I always told people, because I always think the proof is in the pudding, probably not the best metaphor, but you know, it’s like they hear it so often, we’ve become so fat phobic but the people who don’t eat fat are soft and old. If you want to have great hair, skin, and nails, you’ve got to eat fat and you got to digest it. One of the unfortunate things I see with a lot of people, they’ve just really tweak their fat and protein digestion and they’re just, a key sign of that you’re eating fat and you’re still very dry. Now, that can be something related to hormones, especially estrogen or thyroid metabolism but if those are all in line and you’re still eating fat and you’ve got very oily stool and your skin is not looking so hot, check your fat digestion.

Jonathan: I love talking about that fat digestion JJ and I think that’s a good segway and one thing I wanted to make sure we covered in particular and that was your experience. I hear stories like this all the time, where you’ll have a female who had potentially around the pre or post menopausal phase which is decided to take control of her life and to focus on the quality of the food she is eating and as a side effect, her husband ends up eating differently, not because he wants to but because she’s really the one who is managing the health of the household.

They makes these changes and the husband, despite his best efforts not to, begins to see dramatic changes in his appearance, whereas the wife or the woman does not see them. We call it side effect of fat loss, where it’s like the individual who is trying to do this, is not seeing the results but the one who is. What is the core difference between men and women, as we grow older, how can we overcome that?

JJ: Well, now here’s where it will be a little bit different. Let’s say the man is in his late 50’s and the woman is in her early 50’s, they might kind of almost match there because they are both going through their pauses but the challenge is first of all, women are fat storers by nature. Women has less muscle mass and I remember once when I was on Dr. Phil. Of course women has a tougher times losing weight than men but no explanation, like well it’s this way for survival. We’re suppose to have more fat so that we can survive the famine, so that we can feed our babies even if we’re not getting fed. This is all here for a reason, however, we can steal some of the secrets from the men and here’s some of the secrets that I see from the men. For women, we have a much and I’m sorry Jonathan, I would say the women are Aston Martins and the guys are VW Bugs.

Jonathan: I continue…

JJ: Alright, okay but hormonally, you’ve got testosterone, and cortisol, thyroid. Okay we’ve got testosterone, estrogen, progesterone and I’m leaving out obviously DHA and all this other stuff but cortisol, thyroid. We cycle and that changes everything. We also have much less muscle mass than you guys do and a higher body fat percentage and we have a much more intricate tie-in with our moods and serotonin and dopamine than you guys do.

You guys tend to, and this is just the way we are set up, it’s our DNA. You guys don’t generally stress long-term over things. If there’s a fire, you put it out and then you wait until the next fire. Now, if you see a little bit of smoke somewhere, there’s smoke over there and when it gets to be a fire, you go put it out. We see smoke and we worry about the smoke, is the smoke going to turn into anything? What should do we do about the smoke, we call our girlfriends about the smoke, we’re concerned about the smoke. We’re stress out about the smoke.

We have cookies because we’re concerned about the smoke we better have the cookies, so that we’re not stressed. You see what I mean? We’re just, we’re totally set up differently and I think some of the lessons we can learn here are, number one, build more muscle mass. That’s a big key and also number two, deal with your stress better. You look at a man when he comes home and I took this very cool course analysis from Alison Armstrong, it’s called Man 101. We call it the man course but Understanding Men, Celebrating Women or Celebrating Men Satisfying Woman.

She talks about the fact that a man comes home from work, goes and sits on the couch and he does this transition thing and he de-stresses and does all that, not women. Women, there is no, women have a home, it’s their second job, and they have a first job and there’s no end ever on any of the jobs. We just don’t do the things that help us handle stress and if we are not handling stress well, we are going to go through menopause with the worst possible situation, where the only hormone going up is cortisol, which is going to make us store more fat around our waist, make us more insulin resistance, which then will make us have more estrogen dominance, less progesterone, problems with testosterone, it screws up all your cycles. Estrogen is going to come down too and you’re a mess, the best thing you can possibly do to prepare yourself for menopause is focus on handling stress and putting yourself at the top of the of your totem pole instead of at the bottom and not even on the list. We really are at the CEOs our personal health care system, which is our family and the best way to be the CEO is to lead by example.

If you think your kids are going to go to bed on time, eat healthy and exercise and you are staying up late, getting up too early, eating on the run and blowing off your exercise, that’s what your kids see and that’s what your kids model. You really have to get out of feeling like you don’t have time or it’s selfish or whatever and into to going, ‘okay, I want to set the best example for my family because I recognize that by me taking care of myself, I will be more effective at home but also my kids will then do that and guess what, I’m setting this up for future generations.’

Jonathan: I’m actually the clap track, right there. I love this. I don’t have the simulated clapping so I have to do it myself but here, here JJ, I love it. It reminds me of, and at the risk of being trite, but at the risk of being the canonical example. When you are on an airplane, the constant message you hear is ‘please affix your own oxygen mask before you assist others,’ because if you are deprived of oxygen, and you’re not living fully, you cannot help anyone else live fully. I feel like a lot of us are depriving ourselves of our life source and if we ever hope to help anyone else, we’ve got to put on our oxygen mask first. Now, that’s what we are talking about.

JJ: It’s not about being an martyr baby, it’s that martyrdom thing, get rid of it, be a role model. Step up and lead.

Jonathan: Please understand that in doing that, it’s not selfish thing, in fact, it’s very selfless. Another analogy I like to use is, imagine you want to teach somebody math but you don’t take the time to learn math. You can never teach anybody math, unless you learned it first. If we spent all of our time just being like, I just want to teach math, I just want to teach math, but you never actually took the time to learn it, then what good are you? If you want to teach health and you want to teach these wonderful habits that you are describing here, you’ve got to do them first.

JJ: Yeah, it’s just like, I remember back when I used to see people one on one and you’d have someone who wanted to quit smoking and they just couldn’t do it. I go, well, do you want your kids to smoke? Oh, no, they’ll never do that. I go guarantee they will, guarantee it. You just can’t ever ask anybody to do something you yourself are not willing to do but to me, that’s the ultimate empowerment, because that means, you can be that starfish being thrown back into the ocean, you can totally change the world based on you because especially now on social media, like you do it, pass it on and on and on. That’s healthcare reform.

Jonathan: Absolutely and its going back, I’ve used this quote probably seven times now on the show but it is just so true. It is Ghandi saying be the change you want to see and literally, if I were to say one tip based on our conversation here, it is like the easiest and most profound way you can help others is by helping yourself in this way, personally, that’s what I believe.

JJ: Me, too. I’ve got that coffee mug.

Jonathan: I love it, I love it. Well, JJ obviously, the book is doing amazingly well. The book again folks, it’s called the Virgin Diet. Excuse me, apparently, I’m going through some hormonal changes, it’s called Virgin Diet and it is a fabulous read and of course,you’ve got a bunch of awesome information on your websites, jjvirgin.com and the virgindiet.com. What’s coming next?

JJ: Oh my God, I just sold a three book deal yay expect then all of sudden you go “Oh my Gosh I sold three book deal.” It’s kind of like aahhh. The Virgin Diet Cookbook is up next and then after that the book, I don’t know if I’m allowed to blab about it, I’m such a blabbermouth too but then the next one after that is, I’ll just say it’s really looking at one of those seven and exploding out there in a big way. It’s my absolute, I’m going to start a revolution on it and there is a cook book too, so a new PBF show around that one. I actually think it will be bigger than this but, a lot of stuff in between then and now and then.

Jonathan: That’s awesome JJ. I really appreciate all that wonderful work and I really appreciate all that you do to help bring this message of food quality and hormonal health to the mainstream because I feel like oftentimes, individuals who are versed in the science are amazingly knowledgeable and are amazingly passionate but one tweet from a misinformed celebrity or one reality television show that focuses on just starvation and chronic cardiovascular exercise can so easily undo the effort of all the [crosstalk 33:56] bloggers in the world, so I appreciate you going out there onto the mainstream a bit and helping to spread this message because I think that it is so important to bring the mainstream around, to the importance of quality over quantity, so thank you very much.

JJ: Oh and thank you back, I love your work.

Jonathan: Thank you so much JJ and I appreciate it. Now folks again, her book New York Times bestseller, the Virgin Diet, an excellently read. Her websites, thevirgindiet.com and jjvirgin and that you can tell from our talk today, just a wonderful woman, a wonderful author, a wonderful speaker and a wonderful example, so JJ, thank you so much for being with us.

This week we have the pleasure of hearing from JJ Virgin. JJ is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Virgin Diet as well as Six Weeks to Sleeveless and Sexy, and is here to show us how eating low-quality foods–even in moderation–can cause fat gain.

The Virgin Diet: Drop 7 Foods, Lose 7 Pounds, Just 7 Days