Clean(ish) with Gin Stephens

Hey JJ Here. Every year around this time, I get the urge to make my home feel a little extra special. A space that feels just like the holidays. And Wayfair is my go to for that. Think cozy textures, twinkly decor, warm lighting, and all those little touches that make you want to curl up with a good book and a blanket. You'll usually find my books stacked on a great little end table I got from Wayfair, proof that function and style give can coexist. Now, whether you're adding last minute hosting essentials, picking out gifts for loved ones, or refreshing your decor for the season, Wayfair makes it easy with beautiful finds, great prices and fast delivery. And when the holidays wind down, Wayfair has everything you need to tuck it all neatly away. Smart storage solutions for every room from the kitchen to the closet. Plus, with free shipping for any order over $35, don't that's fast delivery and a total peace of mind. It's the perfect mix of joy and order, bringing the holiday spirit in, then storing it all with ease. If you're ready to make your home feel as good as it looks, get organized, refreshed and ready for the holidays. For way less head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. Wayfair Every style Every home that's W A Y F A I R.com hey, it's JJ here. You know, I've been talking about environmental toxins forever, and laundry detergent is a sneaky one. A lot of them contain harsh chemicals like dyes, preservatives, and even UV brighteners. Those brighteners don't actually clean anything, they just coat fabric so your eyes think things look whiter or brighter. That's more chemicals I don't want on my family sheets or skin. And if you've got sensitive skin or allergies around the house, this can be a big problem. That's what got my attention about Earth Breeze. It looks like a dryer sheet, but it's actually laundry detergent. You toss one in the washer and that's it. No pouring, no mess, and no heavy plastic jug. Their packaging is lightweight cardboard, which helps reduce plastic waste. And if you choose the fragrance free option, it's gentle, hypoallergenic, non irritating and non sensitizing. I really like how simple it is and how fresh and clean everything comes out without those unnecessary chemicals. Right now you can try Earth Breeze for up to 40% off with free gifts@earthbreeze.com virgin that's earthbreeze.com virgin for up to 40% off plus free gifts on your first order.

This episode is brought to you by.

McAfee swimsuit passport phone with VPN activated. Then cell phone service is gonna be spotty on vacation, so we'll be using public Wi fi.

Sounds sketchy.

Exactly.

The networks can leave your personal info like credit card numbers exposed to hackers.

McAfee's secure VPN lets you browse and bank safely from wherever, whenever. Learn more@mcafee.com online protection.

Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. Here I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode, I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more. So if you want to get healthy and get off the dieting for life merry go round, I'll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better. Fast. I am super excited to have my buddy Jen Stevens back with me. I had her on before to talk about her New York Times bestseller Fast Feast Repeat. You probably have heard of her. She is like, gosh, this Facebook group.

Of I think half a million people.

Now, all intermittent fasting. All through her own journey when she lost 80 pounds after trying everything through intermittent fasting. So she has now come out with another book which is really interesting that we'll be digging in today called Cleanish. Eat mostly clean, live mainly clean, and unlock your body's natural ability to self clean. So we're going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about her whole intermittent fasting journey, what she's learned along the way, and how it can help you with getting healthier too. All right, so stick with me. We will be right back.

Hey, it's J.J. here. Now let's be honest. The holidays are basically a financial ambush. Travel, hosting, gifts, surprise holiday school, things. Suddenly you're wondering how December turned into a spending spree. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or your phone. What really grabbed my attention is how fast those little holiday expenses pile up with Monarch. Seeing everything in one place makes it a lot harder to accidentally overspend. And honestly, I appreciate anything that keeps me from starting January with a money hangover you'll love exploring the holiday spending category. Imagine how good it will feel to actually see what's happening before your credit card statement does that whole dramatic reveal thing. Monarch basically shows you exactly where the money is going in real time. And that level of clarity could change everything.

Right.

Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monimal.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code Virgin.

Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Columbia engineers everything we make, make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever.

All right, Jen, it is so good to have you back with your new book, Cleanish. Welcome.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Well, for those who don't know you, I'd love to kind of go back and start with how the heck did you go from, you know, being in education to now being a massive trusted authority and in intermittent fasting? How did this happen?

Well, you know, I did something that got people's attention. I lost over 80 pounds, and my friends and colleagues and everyone I knew, they were super excited and wanted to know how to do it. So I started a tiny little Facebook group. You know, did you know, jj, you can't start a Facebook group by yourself? So I had to put my husband in it. He wasn't.

What do you mean you can't start a Facebook group by yourself?

Just you. It has to be two people to be a group. Oh, at least.

Got it. That's what I meant.

It can't be just by. You can't be the only person in it. So I started the group with me and had to put my husband in it. But then, you know, I added some friends that wanted to know about intermittent fasting. And to make a long story short, this was in 2015. That first group grew to be several groups with almost half a million combined members. And over what period? How.

Like, how long did it go from you and your husband being a group to half a million people?

Well, see, from 2015 is when I started that very first group. And, you know, after the first week, I had about 30 people that felt a little better. And I took Chad right out of the group because he was not even doing intermittent fasting at that time. But people kept bringing their friends wandering in because it had intermittent fasting in the name of it. So suddenly people started wandering in. I'm like, who are they? Why are they here? But okay, come on in. I will say my elementary teacher background prepared me for. For running groups, like, all the things, you know, that. Remember that book? Everything I learned, I learned in kindergarten.

Yes.

Well, everything I learned about managing adults, I learned in the elementary classroom because the same things, you know, people want to feel heard, they want to feel valued, but, you know, you. You have high expectations from them. So our groups were very positive places that people wanted to be a part of. And so more people came and more people came, and it just.

That's so crazy.

It really is.

Let's go back a little further, because you just kind of threw out there. Oh, I lost. La la, la, la. All right, well, how did you come across intermittent fasting, and what did you do to make this work for you?

You know, I was one of those people that was struggling. You know, I have a doctorate in gifted education, and I was obese, and I was trying everything under the sun to figure out, you know, how. How can I lose this weight and keep it off? I did some yo yo things, some crazy things. Up and down, up and down.

What's the craziest thing you ever did?

Well, it might be the. The HCG diet, where you go to the doctor's office and you get shots of. Of pregnancy hormone and you eat 500 calories a day for 42 days.

I remember that I was a personal trainer in Beverly Hills at the time, and that was the thing.

It was the thing.

I was like, oh, my gosh, it was nuts.

Well, I was. I was struggling, and so I would go, like, I'd be sitting there and I'd be bored. So I'd go to my computer and I'd go to Amazon. I'd go to the weight loss category, and I'd look at the books. I'd say, what? Number one, what's doing well? And I would start looking at the books, and I would be like, well, let me try that one. Let me try that. I was, like, the biggest diet shopper in the world. So of course I came across intermittent fasting, but I didn't understand because really, nobody was talking about it as a lifestyle back then. This is like between 2009 to 2014, when I was still in those struggle years. And so I would dabble here and dabble there. And one thing about intermittent fasting is you can't dabble because you have to train your body to be metabolically flexible. Those words were not even out there. Nobody knew what that meant getting adapted. So I would do it for a couple days, then I would not do it. And then. So I was basically living in the hard part. But because we didn't really understand what all had to go on, you know, nobody knew to tell me, hey, you got to be more consistent. And here's why. So finally, in 2014, I was the biggest I'd ever been. I went on a family vacation. I looked at the photos. I was like, oh, no, I've got to do something. That was when I was 210 pounds. I was obese.

So you're what, you're like a bitty thing?

I'm five five. So.

Well, I'm six feet, so everyone's a bitty thing to me.

But, you know, I actually, when I got off that cruise ship, I'm like, it's gonna have to be HCG again. So I actually went straight to hcg. And then I tell this whole story in delay. Don't deny. And then it was like. I was like, it was terrible. I was white knuckling it. I was like, I can't do this. So I cut that out early. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to just do keto. The science makes such good sense. I'm going to do it. So that was the summer of 2014. I did keto the entire summer and lost zero pounds and was starving.

Holy smokes.

Yeah. My body didn't love it. And so finally, by the end of the summer, I was like, you know, because I was in all these groups and they're like, just keto harder. Adjust your macros. So I was like, I just can't do this anymore. And I was starving all the time. And so I was like, remembering intermittent fasting. And I'm like, I'm just going to go back to that. And so I did. And this time I didn't quit. For the first time ever. Now I will say I think I was fat adapted from keto. That might have been the secret sauce. I mean, I didn't even know what was going on. I didn't understand any of the science behind it. But I feel like being fat adapted from keto helped me because I had already.

I don't know what fat adapted means.

All right. We are meant to be metabolically flexible as humans. We're supposed to be able to switch fuel sources as needed. We, when we eat, we're supposed to be able to use whatever we're eating as a fuel. But then when we are not eating, our body is supposed to be able to flip. Use our stored fat. That's why it's there make ketones out of the stored fat, give us great energy. In our brains we feel amazing, but in the modern world, we've lost that ability that we're born with. And so, you know, the advice we've all been given to eat frequent small meals all the time, you know, we're eating the hundred calorie snack packs didn't work at all. But that trains us to be sugar burners instead of fat burners. And so the reason someone who's following that conventional advice is starving when they eat their little tiny low calorie whatever. And then an hour later you're starving and hangry. It's because your body cannot tap into your fat stores at that point. And so you feed, you have to keep feeding yourself. And so keto allowed me to become metabolically flexible, even though it didn't lead to weight loss. I didn't feel great. And it wasn't because I didn't keto hard enough, I promise. But I switched to intermittent fasting and immediately started losing weight. And I started losing at the rate of about a pound a week.

And what, when you say that, what, like, because, you know, there's so many different intermittent fasting models now. What exactly were you doing?

I was doing a five hour eating window. That was it. I was following the teachings of Dr. Bert, hearing one of the very early people who wrote about intermittent fasting, he had. It was called the Fast five Diet and Lifestyle. That was the name of it. And it was just easy. It was just have a five hour eating window, move it around, however you need to do that, go. That was the book. And so that's what I did. And I can't remember where I got the advice. It might have been in his book or it could have been somewhere else that I read it, but I suddenly was weighing daily and once a week, calculating my weekly average. Because I was one of those people, if you ever did something crazy like hcg, where you dropped the weight, an insane quick, quick weight drop, which is not really fat loss, it's not a normal rate of loss. But I was having these unrealistic expectations. So if intermittent fasting didn't give me rapid weight loss, I was like quitting. But this time I had a strategy for looking at my overall trend. So I weighed daily and once a week on notebook paper. I would calculate my weekly average and only compare the weekly averages. And for the first time ever, I saw that I was losing weight week to week from my weekly average. My trend was going down. Even if my Friday weight was higher than the Friday before. My weekly average was down. So it encouraged me to not quit. Looking at the trend really kept me going. So I was losing at the rate of about a pound a week. I just kept losing and I kept with it and I didn't quit. And then eventually went on to lose over 80 pounds. And again, like I said, people, when they see that you've done it, they want to hear how. And so that led to me, of course, with the groups. Then in 2016, I self published a book called Delay, Don't Deny that was my very first book. And I didn't know what I was doing. But, you know, I was like, there needs to be a resource that has all the best advice in one place and I'm just going to write it and direct people that are coming into my groups to that resource. And that was my motivation for writing it. I was so excited that first. The first few months I was selling like 17 copies a day. And I was so excited, hey, here's the thing.

That's huge. You realize that I think it's something like the average author is lucky if they ever sell 100 books. So I mean, the fact that you're doing that back then, like, is crazy.

Well, I was so excited. Yeah.

I mean, and. And the title, did you come up with the title? The title?

I did. I thank you.

Titles are awesome.

Titling is my gift. My editor is like a ninja strategy. It's fantastic, you know, and all of them are actionable. Delay, Don't Deny, Fast, Feast, repeat, and with Cleanish, the subtitle, you know, fast, mostly clean, live, mainly clean. It's all of what you're going to do.

Yeah. Love it. Okay, so you did that. You wrote that book. You had 17 people a day buying the book. You didn't know, but you weren't doing anything. It just was happening, which is just crazy when you think about it. It just shows when you've got something that's working out there, like it can just take off.

Well, I worked 24, 7 in those groups, so it didn't just happen by accident.

You were working full time as a teacher, weren't you?

Okay, here. I'm so glad I'm retired. And if anybody hears this, that I used to work for. Too late, Too bad. I was the gifted teacher. And, you know, Maria Montessori has a great quote about early childhood education. She says the sign of a great teacher is that the children are all working as if you're not there. So I trained my children what to do and how to do things. They're all working and I'm just kind of sitting there getting them the stapler and helping them print things and they're doing these amazing projects and I'm.

You were doing your Facebook group and.

I'm like secretly over there. Okay, so sorry. Yes, that's what I was doing. Sometimes I would have to get up and teach them how to do something and I would do that and then, you know, go back to it. But anyway, statute of limitations, I'm retired now. But, you know, and when they would go to their art class, I had some time. So I would check in throughout the school day, even though I definitely was not supposed to be doing that.

Oh my gosh. And then when did you do the next book?

Well, the next book happened because Delay Don't Deny became a lot more successful than 17 copies a day. I can remember the first month I sold a thousand copies. And then I was like, I think I'm going to be able to afford to retire. Then in the summer of 2018, I got knocked off by some book pirates. But the way that they do it is they retyped the whole book and had a pirated copy of it. But they were having third party sellers sell it on Amazon right there in the buy box because they had the lowest price. It wasn't an authentic book.

Wasn't it beautiful when this happened?

Yeah, it was ridiculous. But all of a sudden I was selling one book every two days or something like that. All of a sudden it fell off a cliff of books sales. And I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what because I didn't know you could do all that well.

Who would ever know this stuff? I mean, now we know, like the minute your book comes out, you've got all these knockoffs.

It's crazy.

I want everyone to hear that because like, the minute the Virgin Diet came out, someone published my Virgin Diet. Someone published the Seven Day Virgin Diet. Someone published my Seven Day Virgin Diet cookbook. And I'm like, what the heck? How can you, how can you even call it that? Like, it's my name, you know? So this. Be buyer beware on all this stuff and make sure you're supporting your authors.

It wasn't even that they were accidentally buying a fake one through a different listing. It was they were going to the real listing for Delay Don't Deny, the real one. And when they clicked add to cart, they were getting the counterfeit because the third party seller was in the buy box because the way Amazon works Whoever sells something for the least gets in the buy box. And it wasn't them. It was the third party seller. And so finally we figured out what was happening and Amazon refunded a bunch of money to my people because I was able to prove it. And it was, it was hard, but I was like, I got to get with a real publisher who can protect me.

Yeah.

And so that's how I ended up. I ended up with a fabulous literary agent who you also know and love. The best in the business. I'm so grateful to be a part of or have her on my team or be in her stable, however you wanted to say it. But I'm so grateful to have ended up there. And at first we thought we would say we would just try to traditionally publish. Delay, don't deny. But then I realized I wanted to write a new book because we had learned a lot between, you know, 2016, when I wrote the first book, and all those years of doing the Facebook support groups. I now knew every single question everyone could ask about intermittent fasting. So I wanted to write a more comprehensive book. And that's how we ended up with Fast Feast Repeat, which went on to be a New York Times bestseller. And that was very exciting.

I know, it's super exciting. And becoming a New York Times bestseller is no easy feat. It's a big, big, big deal. And so then you wrote Cleanish. And what I love, first of all, love the title. Say the whole title and the line.

After it again, okay, it's cleanish, eat mostly clean, live mainly clean, and unlock your body's natural ability to self clean. And the thing about that book is it is not an intermittent fasting book. You know, after my first book did so well, the first traditionally published, they were like, now what's going to be your next intermittent fasting book? And I'm like, it's not going to be about intermittent fasting. And they're like, what?

I know. They're all like, no, you can only write this. Just write it 50 different ways.

I was like, you know, I've already gotten my people, they wrote, they bought my first book, and then I got them to buy another book. And I don't want to say, now here's another way to do intermittent fasting, because that Fast Feast Repeat was the comprehensive intermittent fasting book that I wanted to write. And it's still, I mean, it's selling great, right? Right now, every single day, it's exponentially going up. And that's very exciting because it's been, gosh, A year and a half since it came out, almost two years now. But I wanted to write something because one thing that we find in the intermittent fasting world is people come to it wherever they are. I started eating the Standard American Diet. When I was doing it, I had been doing keto, but when I started intermittent fasting, I'm like, I'm now going to just eat all the things that I've been missing. I was eating.

Jen, I don't know if you're like, when I published, I think it was the Sugar Impact diet. They had me on the Today show and they did a double segment with me and David Chinchenko and David Shinchenko had just written the eight Hour Diet. The eight Hour Diet right now, for those of you don't know, he was known for eat this, not that. But the eight Hour Diet was basically, no, go ahead and eat that. Just not during this, just only in this time. And I go, how can you say don't eat the stuff? But now you're saying, eat the stuff in this window. And that used to be the thing with intermittent fasting. They go, you can eat whatever you want as long as it's in this window.

You absolutely still can. I like to distinguish eat whatever you want. It's the way you emphasize it. You can eat whatever you want, emphasis on you. But it's not eat whatever you want. That is not a weight loss strategy. And when I was, I tried the eight hour Diet back then and I gained weight because you tell me, eat whatever I want in eight hours, buddy. I can do it. So that didn't work for me. But the five hour eating window later in the day, that was enough of bumpers for me, even with eating whatever I wanted. Over time, though, what we find in the intermittent fasting community is people start to tune into their body's signals and you realize you don't feel great with what you're eating. You start all of a sudden eyeing the brussels sprouts and you realize that you want your food to be window worthy. Then you notice. So it's a natural progression that we find in community that we don't tell you, here's how you're going to have to eat. But people start wanting to eat better foods. So that was the whole point of Cleanish when you're ready to take it to the next level. But you don't have to be an intermittent faster toto read Cleanish. It's not an intermittent fasting book, although there's one chapter about intermittent fasting, because I think that's one of your most powerful, if not the most powerful, self cleaning mechanisms. Intermittent fasting helps our bodies clean, rest and repair during the daily fasting time.

Well, don't gloss over that. That's a really important concept.

It is really.

Well, before we talk about that one, I'm going to cliffhang. So we're going to come back and talk about self cleaning because there's so much about detoxes and cleanses and all that. So hang with us. We'll be right back for that.

This episode is brought to you by Buffalo Trace Distillery. Powerful yet smooth contained, but never tame. Proudly going their own way, but never going alone. This is the spirit inside Buffalo Trace Bourbon made at Buffalo Trace Distillery, the world's most award winning distillery. Buffalo Trace is always perfectly untamed. Distilled, aged and bottled by Buffalo Trace distillery, Franklin County, Kentucky. 90 proof, 45% alcohol by volume. Learn more@buffalotrace distillery.com Please drink responsibly.

So let's get into your self cleaning because I saw you were about to go on to the next thing. I'm like, hold on J.

Stop. Stop right there. All right, so in 2016, the whole intermittent fasting community was really excited when the Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded based on research into autophagy. And unless you are a high level scientist, no one had ever heard that word before. We're like, what? But it's basically our body's self cleaning, recycling, up, cycling that goes on and certain things. We're supposed to be able to have autophagy going on as needed in our bodies, but as we get older, we lose it down regulates in our bodies. And eating all the time actually is one of the reasons that it does become to be down regulated in our bodies. A lot of things promote increased autophagy, such as exercise, coffee, also fasting. So that's where the fasting comes in. Because when nothing is coming into the body and you're fasting, all of a sudden your body's got time to clean things up. They're like, alright, nothing's coming in. What's around here? What can I make do with? It's kind of like the upcycling teachers are great at that. We get a bunch of old junk and turn it into something new. That's what your body does during fasting. And so it can break down old junky damaged proteins and build new body parts out of them. It can break down any kind of garbage that's just laying around. So autophagy is huge. And having increased autophagy actually helps us age better and just keeps us young.

Yay.

Well, yay. We all want more of that. Yes.

So then walk us through what someone's. Someone's going to get Cleanish because they want this as part of their success library. We're going to also tell you some other cool things that you've got to support that. But someone's doing this. Walk us through, like, what they're going to be doing. Like, is it a cleanse? Is it what things they should be eating? Like, what is it?

Well, that's the beauty of everything that I write is I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do, which also some people are like, I just want you to tell me exactly what to do. But that's not how I roll. So with Cleanish, we start off by learning about the extent of the problem. You know, we've probably all heard the phrase better living through chemistry. And that was the promise of the chemical industry. And they were going to make everything great. We're all going to have Tang. Like the astronauts. We're going to be, you know, drink, having our dehydrated ice cream, whatever the bugs spray.

I did love that Tang back then.

Well, my grandmother always had Tang. It had all those vitamins in there. It was so much better for us. Not really, but we thought it was. And it's actually just chemical garbage. But, you know, we didn't really realize the effects all these chemicals were having on us. So first we start with the root of the problem. It's affected our health in so many ways. We can clearly see that society is not. Well, you know, from children. I taught school for 28 years. I started in 1990. The longer I taught, the sicker our kids have gotten. And, you know, why is it. Well, of course, also they're not eating real food. The chemicals are all around us. So we're starting with the root of the problem. And it is. It's what we eat, it's what we put on our skin, it's what we inhale. It's everything around us keeping us in this constant state of inflammation. And so as you work your way through the book, this is not a book that you're going to get and you're going to read at one sitting or you're going to listen to, you know, you're just going to listen to it on audible, and then it all sinks in. This is a book where you, at the end of every chapter, you're going to take a pause and you're going to reflect and Take action on something and you're going to take stock of where you are, where do you need to improve, where do you want to improve? And you work your way through the book and then at the end you create your own definition of what it means to eat mostly clean to you. What does it mean to live mainly clean? We're all at a different place in the journey. Like if you're somebody who's eating the standard American diet and using conventional products for, you know, beauty products that you buy at the drugstore because that's what you've always done, or the cleaning products that have the commercials on TV because that's what your mom used with all the scents and everything, then you are starting at a different place and you're going to make the change as slowly as it feels right to you. But you might be someone like me. I thought before I started writing Cleanness, I thought I was doing pretty well. The more I learned, I started really digging into, like what I was using to clean my counters. And I was a victim of greenwashing. I thought I was making a healthy choice. But when I learned how to really research. And I'm going to teach you all that in cleanish, how to really check to see if your products are safe or not. Or are you, like me, a victim of greenwashing? And so even if you think you're doing a great job, you might be really, really surprised.

Wow, I didn't know they did that on, like cleaning supplies. You see it in food all the time. Like food. Here's the one that gets me the most crazy because just, just like you. When I was writing Sugar Impact Diet, I was like, wow, I had no idea how much they, they snuck sugar into things. Like, I had no clue. Like, how dare you. You know it's true.

Yeah.

Like, there's a story that I told in Cleanish and it's the what I was using for dish soap and for hand, hand soap. I use whatever dish soap. I wash my hands with it too. But it was like one of those green washed brands.

Well, first of all, why should there be a different hand soap and dish soap?

There's not. It's just the same soap.

It's like, you know, all these different shoes, cross trainers and runners and. Right.

I just use the same soap to wash my hands that I wash my dishes with. But anyway, I looked at it. It was one of those brands that did a great job of convincing us they were better. And I have a tool that I found called probably a lot of your listeners Use it already. The Environmental Working Group has an app, and you can look stuff up. So I'm like, you know, writing about this topic, and I'm like, let me look my stuff up. So I look up this dish soap, and it was rated very, very poorly. I'm like, what? So I sorted the category of dish soaps from best to worst. I mean, that blue dishwashing liquid that we all have. Seen the commercials where they're cleaning the birds Rated higher than what I'd been using, which was nuts. I mean, I didn't. Would never have chosen that and thought that was a good choice, but it was better than what I'd been using. So I was able to pick something that was rated a lot higher than the blue stuff. You know what I mean? And you just make that switch one time, and it's so easy.

Yeah. And you know what's great now is, like, these things are not expensive.

No, they're not.

I've been using my buddy Steven Ezell's. Have you heard of my green fills?

I think so. Is that laundry?

It's laundry. And what's so super cool about it is, you know, one of the biggest wastes are all these containers. So you get the container, and then he sends you the stuff to put in it.

Yes.

So you save a bunch of money because you're not rebuying a container every single time.

That's what I do with all my cleaning products. Have you ever used Branch Basics Obsessed? They have a concentrate, and you get the concentrate, and you can buy either plastic bottles from them or glass bottles, which is, of course, I like the glass bottles. And then it has lines on there, and it's like, this is how much concentrate you put in, and here's how much water you put in. So they're not like shipping you water, and it doesn't have anything in it that's dangerous. It's the same concentrate for laundry, for cleaning your counter, for cleaning bathroom.

It just.

The proportion is different. It's super easy. And I add some essential oils to mine to give them that fresh, clean scent. I use peppermint for my kitchen cleaner, and I use tea tree oil for my bathroom cleaner. But the glass cleaner is just mostly water with a drop or two of the concentrate. And I'm like, well, that's not gonna work. That's ridiculous. It got my stainless steel refrigerator cleaner than anything I'd ever used on it before. Mostly water. Two drops of the. Of the concentrate. But it's saving me money. And it works great. I mean, you don't have to use that brand. There's a ton of different brands out there to choose from. And it feels like it's going to be hard and expensive and it's not going to work. But I found the opposite.

Just shifting what you do, you do it once and then, you know, it's just identifying the new thing.

Exactly.

But I will like back over to the sugar thing because I know you talk food in here too, Right? Here's the one that makes me so nuts. When you go to the store and I think of that like there should be a little parody of the unsuccessful, the unsuspecting mom in the store trying to get the best things for her kids. And she sees the little label that says with real fruit, no sugar added. And she's thinking there's a little halo over her head. And she's looking at it. And the reality is they've got apple juice concentrate which has got more fructose in it than high fructose corn syrup. It's a total lie. It's probably got more sugar in it than a soda. And she's buying it for her kids.

Can I tell you a really embarrassing story?

What?

You know, my oldest son just turned 24 day before yesterday. So when they were little guys, though, I gave them Yoohoo in their sippy cups because it was fortified with vitamins and minerals. And it had so many vitamins and minerals. Wasn't I a good mom?

You have come such a long way.

I know. I mean, I had no idea again. And we were taught in school about nutrition. You need vitamins and minerals. That's what you want. Get your vitamins and minerals. You also need, like, you know, whatever the fiber. And so I was like, well, all I need to do is take a vitamin. Then I'll take a Flintstones vitamin.

I'll be Flintstones, a Yoo Hoo and a fruit. And we got them covered.

That's what I do.

Holy smokes.

I remember going into a nursery school with my kids and some. A mom had dropped off her kid and he was eating a Yoo Hoo and a. And I forget what else. Some. Some horrible thing like that. A granola bar or something. And I'm like, what? You know, I never dawned on me that she'd gotten sold to that. This was like a great. I assumed everyone would know. You don't do Yoo Hoos.

No, I thought it was healthier. I mean, and people are probably now thinking, well, then why should I buy her book? She's a dummy. It's because I have learned a lot again, I've read everything. And, you know, I have a doctorate. I'm able to research, and so I know how to, like, find this stuff. And the more I learned, though, really the madder I got because, you know, I remember one time when I was in high school, I worked at Long John Silver's and I remember standing there, you know, somebody was there. It was a mom and her kids, and they're ordering their meal. And I even, I knew this. Even in high school, I knew this wasn't true. But the kid, I was like, what would you like to drink? And the kid said, I'd like a Coke. And the mom said, no, get orange soda. It's better for you.

You.

She thought that. I'm not making fun of that mom because she thought that was a better choice. I knew it wasn't even in high school, but. But it just goes to show we're not taught, right, the right thing.

I know I laughed about that. But the reality is the manufacturing companies have done everything in their power to create that, to create you thinking, Yoo, who's great because of the vitamins and minerals to create. My mom giving me Pop Tarts most mornings because, you know, it was the great way to start the day. I had Pop Tarts or Captain Crunch or Cocoa Puffs.

And if you look at the label, it's full of vitamins and minerals and nutrients. It looks like, I mean, it's not. You know, real food has stuff in it that you can't. We don't even know what it all is. That's why real food is so powerful. But we just don't really understand it.

I have this thing back when I used to see a lot of people one on one. I would always have them come in. I'd have them just. I go, just, just. All I want you to do is start, is just bring in, write down what you eat for a couple days. Just don't edit. You will not shock me. Nothing you could possibly do is going to be something bigger than what I've seen. And although a couple times, I will admit I was shocked, but. And then. Because what I wanted to do was see where they are now. And if they were getting a D, I wasn't going to make them into an A overnight. Like, I was going to go, let's go to a C. Like, let's just add. I love to add before you take away, like, let's just add some green vegetables in here, right?

It's crowding out. You're crowding out because you're putting good things in, and then you have less room for those other things. And then eventually you find you've crowded them out more and more. Because you can't change everything at once, right?

No, you can't. I love the book. I think it's. It's Gary Keller. The one thing. It's like, if you just focus on one thing, get. Get that thing nailed, then you can go to the next thing.

Yes, 100%.

If you were looking at someone right now and they're gonna get started, what's the one thing you would have someone focus on first?

See, now I don't have a first. At the back. When they get to part three and they're implementing it, they get to pick the one that resonates with them the most.

So it's kind of where they're at, where the biggest opportunity is.

Choose your own adventure. You know, remember those books that were out? It was like the 80s, like, choose your own adventure. It's very much like that. It's like, here are the adventures you get to choose from. Where do you want to start first? And someone might say, I'm not ready for food yet. I want to start with my cleaning products, or I want to start with my personal care items, or I do want to start with food, or it's just people decide what they want to start with and go there. And then it's one at a time as you feel ready. Because if you feel like you're like, all these things I have to change. It's overwhelming. And you're like, I'm not going to do anything, then this goes on your shelf. I do not want this to be a book that someone buys and puts on their shelf. I want it to be something that guides them and empowers them to make healthier choices every day and to understand how to do that and why to do that and that you're in charge at all times and that, you know, the deodorant police are not going to come over if it's 100 degrees and you put on standard deodorant one day. Right? You know, we're cleanish. We're making choices where we can, and you just have to choose what's important to you. I use clean beauty, clean makeup every single day. But if it's really, really high, I might put on some standard deodorant. And it's all about figuring out that.

Crystal doesn't do a thing.

I'm on the constant search for finding one that works really well. It's not easy.

Well, my buddy Kara golden of Hint has made a great deodorant. So give that one a try. Yes.

Deodorant, yes.

Sunscreen is so delicious.

I do love the sunscreen. I have used their sunscreen.

So yes, she came out with deodorant too. And that is very exciting because I remember when I first got that, that crystal deodorant and I'm like, this first of all, hurts like a putting a crystal in your underarm. And second of all, don't drop it because it breaks. And third, it doesn't work. So.

And then the deodorant starts to smell like BO Like, I'm not kidding, like you take the lid off. I'm like, does my deodorant smell like B.O. yes, if the deodorant itself smells. I mean, I probably. Anyway, you know what I mean? If you've tried one that isn't effective, eventually you rub it on your underarm enough, the deodorant itself starts to stink. You don't even need to put it on. Save yourself a step.

So it makes a ton of sense now why you've created this action guide because, and I love this thing where you are empowering someone to really see where they are now, where they want to be and then, you know, what's the first step? What's the next step? So you have an action guide that you've got with the book that you are going to be able to download and it's going to be at jjvirgin.com forward/cleanish.

Go figure.

Is now, of course you're going to want to grab the book with it because they go together. But this is, this is free and this is so that people will actually be able to implement.

Right? Because that's the most important part. You know, in the very beginning I say we don't make change by the reading, we make change by the doing. So you're going to have to do something.

You are such a teacher.

Well, I am a teacher. I'm sorry, I can't help it. The most person who's most annoyed by that is my husband. Husband. But I will.

Hey. And speaking of that, so I remember at the beginning you said, and I know we talked about this before, that your husband at first wasn't on the intermittent fasting train.

Right.

Is he now?

Absolutely. He has a PhD in medicinal chemistry. He studied drug design and he has a health focus and he's never needed to lose weight. He's always been. He's like one of those annoying people that wears the same size pants that he wore at our wedding when we got married in 1991 and just told me, just eat less and move more, and that's all you need to do. I'm like, thank you, sweetie. I've never heard that before.

Wow.

Anyway, but he watched me lose the weight and saw me get so much healthier, to the point, like, I no longer have seasonal allergies, for example, and I no longer have to go to the doctor and get antibiotics because I'm not catching everything that comes along like I used to. And so he's like, tell me a little bit more about this. And so he started it just for the health benefits. And, you know, he no longer eats breakfast. He opens his eating window with lunch. He has dinner every night, thoroughly enjoys his food, but he feels way better than he used to when he started with breakfast.

I think this is really important because, again, you know, and I really feel like we're making a shift in the world right now, where it used to be like, you change your eating because you want to lose weight instead of changing your diet, changing your lifestyle habits, changing all of that because you want to be healthier. Because what do we know? We know that if you want to be healthy, that if you get healthy, you'll lose weight, that you actually can't lose weight to get healthy. You have to lose. You can't lose weight to get healthy. You have to get healthy to lose weight. And so there's the benefits. The benefits, first of all, of getting out toxic things out of your diet and out of your house. Like just. Just some of these dirty processed foods and the seed oils. Those make me crazy.

And we were told to use those. We were told they were heart healthy. Oh, yeah.

Vegetable oils.

Yeah.

Corn oil and canola oil and safflower and soybean oil.

Oh, gosh, they're so inflammatory.

They're just nightmare. So, you know, whatever this is for that, that's the cool thing. You look at a lot of these things like, you know, all right, let's improve your food quality. Let's shorten your window, your eating window. Let's get these toxins out. And they seem to correct everything that's kind of going off. Like, is it allergies? You know, is it joint pain? Right.

It's like, it does.

It's.

Whatever you've got going on is your. Your symptom of your unhealthy lifestyle. And so, I mean, we've heard, you know, I've been doing this now for a lot of Years and managing big communities. And I have a podcast and I've recorded, you know. Well, I have three podcasts. But, you know, I talk to a lot of people who do intermittent fasting, and some of the things that they talk about that have resolved would be unbelievable if you didn't hear it from so many people. Like, crazy stuff. Like their gray hair is now no longer gray. I mean, that didn't happen for me.

Say I was like, well, not me.

I'm not promising that's going to happen. But I've heard that from so many people, like old scars disappearing, ridiculous kind of stuff that you're like, that can't be real. But you hear it from 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 people. You're like, well, there's got to be something to it.

Yeah.

It's just so many things in our bodies can be corrected by intermittent fasting.

Here's the thing. I remember having this amazing nutrition mentor early on, Robert Cran, and he said it is not normal to get sick. Like every year I would get this horrific either cold or flu. And by the way, I got it every year end of January. And I thought it was from the season. Well, no, I was a weight loss person. Guess what? January killed myself. Right? And so I kind of went, oh, wait a minute. And then he said, you know, when you're sick, it's a sign that something's not right. And I was like, oh, I thought that you just get sick a couple times a year. It's normal. Right. And so I stopped the habits that were doing that. All the overworking, stressed out craziness. And I don't get sick in January.

I haven't been to the doctor for an illness since 2015, like, which is astonishing. I was the person getting ear infections left and right and no more. I haven't haven't needed an antibiotic since then, so yay.

Well, you fixed your gut microbiome.

I did.

That's another thing. Intermittent. I mean, there's like the benefits of intermittent fasting and then the benefits of, you know, getting these toxins out of your house and then out of your body, which is a whole other conversation. Right. I mean, are just. They go on and on and on. And I love the way, of course, a teacher would put this together.

Well, that's me. I can't help it. That's the whole point. Knowledge is power. And the flip side of that, ignorance is bliss. Not really. You might think that everything's fine, but ignorance is bliss, is really sending you down a bad health path. Knowledge is power, even if it's scary knowledge.

Yeah. Because catch it early. Do something about it.

Exactly.

Go to Amazon, go to Jen Stevens, get all the books, make sure you get Cleanish. Then go to jjvirgin.com cleanish so you can get the action guide that goes with it so that you can just work through all of this stuff. Because I think we tend to get all gung ho, believe we can do too much in a week. But if you do a little bit in a week and a little bit more the next week and like you look over a year and just like you, you lost £80, your whole health transformed and everything changed and you had a new business and you quit your job.

Job. Absolutely. And now I can work from anywhere.

I know that was always my biggest, my biggest goal in life was that I wanted to have. Back then there was no laptop, so I couldn't call it a laptop life. But I knew I wanted to work from anywhere. That was what I wanted to be able to do.

And yeah, here we are living, living that dream and helping people to improve their lives. There's no better feeling.

There isn't. So thank you again, my friend. So glad to have you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hey there. Hope you love that interview as much as I loved interviewing my buddy Jen. It's been fun to get to be friends with her over the last year and I'm super excited to hear your results from Getting Cleanish. And again, remember to get the action guide@jjvirgin.com forward/cleanish. And then let me know how it's going for you and be sure to to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming up next on the show.

Hello, listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next reading. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website what Should I read next podcast.com to find out more.