Free The Virgin Diet by JJ Virgin

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?
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    Food is not just food, it’s also information.
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    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.
SO WHAT CAN I EAT?
    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.
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    You won’t feel hungry. You won’t feel deprived. You’ll just feel better.
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    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