Biggest Diet Mistakes: 7 Foods To Never Eat | JJ Virgin

I've had like this amazing, fun career out there. Anyone see Freaky Eaters? Anyone in the room? There's usually one. All right, well, that's why it got canceled. Thank you. It was this very wacky show. It was like horrible Hoarders Meats. My strangest addiction, where people would get hooked on a certain food and that was all they ate. And strangely enough, it was never salmon or Brussels sprouts. It was French fries and cheese and bread. All those things that maybe we feel a little addicted to. Anyone? Anyone here? Cheese, bread. I've seen you this morning eating. I know what's going on. So I've been obsessed with. Obsessed with metabolism and weight loss for 30 plus years. I paid my way through college and graduate school and doctoral school as a personal trainer, which was awesome because I could see right away that what they were teaching me in school, low fat diets, endurance exercise, was actually making my clients worse. More tired, more hungry, more craving, more inflamed and fatter. And I knew pretty clearly that I wasn't going to be successful at what I was doing by making people worse. Right? There's no personal trainer in history that says, wow, I made my clients fatter. And so they're paying me more money. It doesn't work. And so I became obsessed back then. Some might call me the earliest Biohacker Dave, because I got obsessed back then that I was going to crack the code and figure out what was making people gain weight or. Or make it hard to lose weight. Because whether it's weight loss or more energy or better focus or reducing your risk of all the major diseases, there's a code, there's a system. And I was determined to figure it out. Once I figured it out, I was determined to get that message everywhere. Now, along the way, I kept saying that all the stuff that happens when you go out big in the world that you all know because you're experiencing, you know, the haters, oh, she's a quack. She's crazy. Because I used to say calories don't count. And people were like, God, of course they do. All the stuff that happens during that time, I said, you know, none of that matters. As long as my kids are okay and they're healthy and they're happy, I can deal with all the rest of this stuff. Any parent in the room feel that way. It's like, right? Yeah. So I was getting ready to launch the Virgin diet and I knew this is all about food intolerance, which is what my workshop today is about. I knew That I cracked the code, that there are a lot of different reasons we can become weight loss resistant. But this one was the fast ticket to changing your health practically overnight, like in seven days. And I wanted to get it out there, so I took all of my book advance, plus I had a million dollars invested in this book to get it out there to the world public television special, all this stuff. I did not have a million dollars. So not only had I taken the full advance, I'd also borrowed, but I believed in it. I knew I wanted to get out there. But I'm also the primary financial support for my family. I have two boys. At the time, they were 15 and 16. And two months before this was all going down, the book was coming out. I come home one night and my 16 year old's all pissy and wants to go to a martial arts class. But he hadn't been to school that day because he had a headache. It's amazing how headaches resolve so quickly. And the big rule was if you couldn't go to school, then you don't get to do the fun stuff afterwards. So I'm holding firm to this. I'm actually very proud of myself. For how long? Much I'm holding firm. The last words he said to me were, I'm not as strong as you think I am. Marched out of the house. Next time I saw him, that's actually the cleaned up version. I will never get the other version or that out of my head, ever. I will see it forever. As I walked into the hospital and his body was skinned raw from the road, this woman hit him, got out of the car, gasped, got in the car and left my son in the street. He had a torn aorta that kills 90% of people on the scene. That's what killed Princess Diana. He had multiple brain bleeds. He was in a deep, deep coma. Nine Glasgow score. It's the biggest coma you can have. He had 13 fractures. His femurs were sticking out of his thighs. When I saw him, he had a tube out of his head. It was managing the pressure in his brain. He was on a ventilator. It was breathing for him. He had a central line. He looked like the Incredible Hulk. He was so swollen. And the doctor said to us, he goes, with all of these injuries, you've got to let him go. He'll die sometime in the next 24 to 48 hours because of the torn aorta. And we said, well, can't you fix it? And they go, you know, if we fix it here, we have to use a blood thinner so his brain will bleed out. You basically have to choose his brain or his heart. And we asked the right question. Well, what would you do if this was your son? He goes, well, there is a surgeon who can do this, but you'd have to airlift him. And he'll never survive the airlift. And even if he survived the airlift, the chance he'll survive the surgery so slim. And even if he survived the surgery, he'll probably never wake up. There's a 25% chance he'll make it. And my other son goes, we will take those odds. My other son's like Yoda. I mean, he's like this amazing, brilliant kid who, 15, was like, you know, keeping us all together that night. And I looked around, I'm like, why are we standing around? Like, we are overruling you, dude. Boom. So we airlifted him. I drove to that hospital, never knowing what I was going to get, because basically I thought I was going up to pick up my son's body. But he made it through that night. And as I stood there in the hospital the next day, because I believe you get what you expect anyone else? Right. I said, what if this was actually the best thing that ever happened to him? What if he could be 110%? Because if I operated from that principle, it was going to be very different than if we just wanted to keep him alive. And so that's what I did. Now, when you've got a loved one in the hospital and he was in a coma, you have to be there all the time, because bad things happen if you are not there. Really bad things. And so I'd get there around 5:30am and I'd leave at 9 at night. But I knew one thing. When you're in the ICU and he was in the pediatric icu, he was front and center in the pediatric icu. You can't get sick. Like, you can't walk into the ICU sick because they won't let you in. So here I was, under the most stress imaginable. And I had a book launch coming up. All the media lined up. The Today Show, Rachael Ray, a public television special where I had to go out and do pledge drives. And if you didn't hit it, your show went off the air. If I didn't hit it, the book went down. There was no, like, let's get a second chance. I was all in there, and I'd be all in for my son, which meant there was no margin of error for my health. People Said, wow, you were like superwoman. I go, you know, I was super healthy. I knew right then and there that I had to do everything. I had to get the sleep that I needed. I ran the hospital stairs. I did an SOS out to all my friends. I had, like, Whole Foods delivering food to the hospital. And I also started to do all sorts of things for my son, too. That's actually my next big book of what we did behind the scenes to bring him back. So when they were not in the room, I was in the room giving him fish oil and progesterone, all sorts of other things. But what I realized then, because I'd been obsessed with weight and metabolism all these years, is that the reason I was able to step up to that level and do that was because of how I'd lived my health. And that for so many people. We think we're going to do it tomorrow, right? You know, oh, I hear what you're saying about the sugar, jj. I hear what you're saying about the gluten. Tomorrow I won't have the bread. And when does tomorrow happen? Tomorrow keeps being tomorrow. It's way out there on the horizon, right? But, you know, when something like this happens, you better be prepared. And whether it's something like this or the most amazing opportunity, are you ready? Or is your health holding you back because you're not playing full out, you're not doing that 100% that you need to do? So I'm always looking for the fastest path to change. What's the fastest path? What's the simplest way? I'm not going to say easy, but I am going to say simple. And early on, when I was that trainer going through graduate school and doctoral school and taking these classes, thank God I took a bunch of biochemistry and endocrinology because what they were teaching us in school didn't jive with the biochemistry of all of this. The one thing we know about diets, there's one thing that all the studies can show you over and over and over again, at the end of the day, they cause weight gain. Think about it. It's like a 97% recidivism rate. But if you change that and realize we've just been following the wrong set of rules out there, right? Our body isn't a bank account. What I was taught back in school is lower your calories, which just actually causes your body to go in starvation mode, eat less fat. Which means if you're eating a low fat diet, and we were told back then, low fat, vegetarian which is high carb. You're just raising insulin and causing your body to store fat. The message to your body, because food is information, is to store fat, not burn it. So what I realized is what we were taught the whole time, this bank account model, this ATM model of weight loss of health is absolutely wrong. And that our body is a chemistry lab and food is information. One of the fastest things you can do to change your health and change everything is change what's at the end of your fork. So I started playing around with this and doing food sensitivity testing. I was doing this in all these different doctors offices, thousands of tests I've looked at. And you know what I discovered? People would walk in because they were tired, their joints hurt. They had autoimmune diseases. They were bloated, they had skin problems. They couldn't focus. They wanted to lose weight. The same foods always showed up. And when we pulled them out, magic happened in a matter of days. And people who had come in because they wanted to lose weight stayed because of how they felt. And so I realized I actually didn't have to do the test. That in reality, the best way to change your health is to go through your own biohacking, your own personal discovery process where you start to connect the dots between what you eat and how you feel. That's why food journaling is the single biggest tool that you can use to change your health. In fact, the study shows that people who use a food journal actually lose twice the weight as people who don't. That simple tool, and I believe you actually need to physically write it down, because there's something about connecting your hand to the paper that makes it real. So as I was looking at this, I went, all right. I keep seeing these foods show up. And what I'm going to do this afternoon in the workshop is go through how easy it is to pull these out, what's really going on. And it's all around something called leaky gut. And leaky gut is when your gut wall becomes more permeable. And this can happen due to stress due to gluten. Gluten actually elevates a protein in your gut that makes your gut more permeable. Stress is the number one thing that makes your gut more permeable. Pain medications make your gut more permeable. Fructose makes your gut more permeable. Fruit is not a free food. It's not a hall pass. Juice is not a health food. Apple juice has more fructose than a Coke. We are giving our kids apple juice and Wondering why diabetes is an epidemic. Fructose is crazy. It's a sugar, and it can only be metabolized by the liver. So when you eat fructose, it seems cool because it doesn't raise your blood sugar, but because it doesn't raise your blood sugar, it doesn't trigger any of the satiety signals either. Instead, it goes straight to the liver and starts making fat. And when it does that, it makes your gut wall more permeable, too. And when your gut's more permeable, again due to stress, due to fructose, due to gluten, due to GMOs, due to pain meds, if you're eating the same foods every day, which we tend to do, gluten, dairy, corn, soy, eggs, peanuts, and you're not digesting well because you actually forgot to chew, or you've got lower stomach acid because you're 30 years older or under stress, those food particles go out into circulation where they have no business being. And your body launches an immune attack and creates these antibodies that grab onto them create immune complexes. And if you're eating the same thing every day, these start to store up in places, creating all those symptoms. I talked the joint pain, the headaches, the fatigue, the brain fog. And here's the worst part of if you don't eat that food one day, the antibodies are still there because your body's going, knowing it's coming again, and you actually start to crave the very food that is hurting you. So if you're sitting here thinking, gosh, I crave dairy, maybe I need it, my body must need that. No, that's not the case at all. It's because you have an immune response to it. So again, here are some of the most common, common signs of food intolerance. Now, here's the challenge with these. These are what we're taught to think of as normal. If you go to any drugstore and you look at all the different things over the counter, they're all things for gas and bloating, digestive issues, headaches, pain. I've seen people turn around chronic pain in days simply by pulling gluten out or one of these issues, dairy or eggs. And what's amazing here is that going through this personal discovery process that I talked about can happen in a matter of weeks. Because as you start to pull these foods out, and I always give people a heads up on this, with these foods, when you pull them out, the first thing that happens is you start to crave them, which is awesome. Did you hear Me, it's fantastic if you're craving cheese, it's fantastic if you're craving bread, because then you know that you're going to get an amazing response. If you're listening to me right now and going, oh, my gosh, she just mentioned everything in my diet, Right. If you're thinking, you're like, shit, that's everything I eat. Awesome. You're going to have an amazing response. And I'm not telling you that all of these foods are your issues, but 90% of the people, and we've had over a million people do this program, 90% of them have something on that list that's an issue. Leaky gut is so common now. So I dare you to do it, because it's just three weeks. And can we agree that we can do anything for three weeks? Right? Because if you can't pull gluten out for three weeks, there's definitely a problem with gluten. And I see amazing things happen in three weeks. Now, the challenge is these foods hide everywhere, especially if you're eating anything that's processed. They use gluten, they use corn, they use soy, they use dairy, and all of these things. Now, this afternoon, I'm going to go through where all these foods hide and why each of these foods can be an issue. Now, you may go through this process and go, you know what? I can eat eggs. They're fine. When I went through the process, initially, I couldn't eat eggs, and after three months of healing my gut, I was good with it as long as I was eating good eggs. Because you're not just you are what you eat, you are what you eat ate. So if you're eating eggs from chickens that are fed soy and corn, it's a whole different thing than if you're eating eggs from chickens that are running around a farmyard eating what chickens eat, which apparently is everything. So there are simple swaps. And this is how I built my program. Because what I found early on as a nutritionist is that you do not give people great ideas of what to eat, and you just pull food out. Nature hates the vacuum, so they actually come up with even worse things than the first things that they had. And also, as you're going through this, I talked about reactions due to immune response, but there's also reactions due to hormonal issues and reactions due to genetics, like true celiac disease or gluten intolerance or lactose intolerance. But what makes this super simple to do is you go through just like Vishen talked I have everyone start the day with a shake. I find one of the biggest places we tend to blow it is at breakfast. And let's think about what was on that big breakfast buffet this morning. Like, the big thing of honey. Like a big. Like, that's like a vat of honey, right? And by the way, honey, it's all natural, right? It's sugar. Doesn't matter if it's natural. Doesn't matter if it came little white stuff or if it's there. Your body takes it in. It's the same thing once it gets into your mouth. So I looked at the breakfast buffet, and there's like, all this jam, all this Nutella, all this bread. They had Cocoa Puffs here. Did anyone have the Cocoa Puffs that wants to admit to it? My fiance wanted to have the Cocoa Puffs, but he knew he was being watched. I was like, but if you look at so many of those things, the obvious things, like the donut, the less obvious, like the muffin. Think about a muffin. If you took a cupcake and you took off the frosting, what do you have, right? You have a cupcake. So you look at what people are having for breakfast, and most of what people are eating for breakfast is dessert. It's the easiest way to start blowing it. Because when you have dessert for breakfast, the cereal with milk, the bread with jam, you get your blood sugar going up. And if your blood sugar goes up, your insulin has to come up. And if your insulin comes up, your insulin says, you know what? We gotta get your blood sugar back down. Because blood sugar is toxic when it's elevated. In fact, one of the crazy things now we know is blood sugar's over 90 consistently, which I look at a lot of fasting blood sugars, and that's starting to become the new average. You have, like, five times the rate of dementia. It's one of the biggest things going, yeah, crazy. So you look at that and you go, all right, if you start the day that way, insulin doesn't move fast. So the minute blood sugar comes down and insulin's still up, the doors to your fat cells, they're locked. So you think at 10 in the morning, oh, you know what? I'm supposed to have a snack. It's that whole thing that started about 20, 30 years ago when we pulled fat out of the diet, where we started eating a higher carbohydrate diet, and we started to have all those unstable blood sugars. And people said, oh, you need to eat every two to three hours to keep your Blood sugar stable. Well, all that happens when you eat every two to three hours is you keep your blood sugar up. If you keep your blood sugar up, you are setting the stage for a lot of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, big problems. So what you want to make sure of in the morning is that you're starting the day with what I call the trifecta here of healthy fats, lean protein, lots of non starchy vegetables and gluten free, low sugar impact carbs. Now understand that all carbohydrates except for fiber turn to sugar. We've gotten obsessed in the US about no added sugar. And people are buying these jams and I go, that's all sugar. And in the US we can actually put things that say no added sugar. And, and we can use fruit juice concentrate, which apple juice concentrate is worse than pretty much anything out there except for artificial sweeteners. So if you're eating a piece of bread, your body is turning it into sugar. It's just a matter of how quickly that's happening. So you want to make sure that as you're eating carbohydrates, you're eating ones that your body has to work hard to turn into sugar, not mainlining sugar. So back over to this real quick. Let me run through some very simple things so you can start to see how easy this is. If you're used to eating corn tortillas, you can do a brown rice tortilla, you could do a lettuce wrap, you could do a coconut tortilla, which is my personal favorite. If you're doing soy sauce, coconut aminos work great. Peanut butter, you can do almond butter, you can do macadamia nut butter, you can do cashew butter. If you're doing a burger bun, you can do an animal style burger. If you're doing white potatoes, you can do sweet potatoes or better yet butternut squash. If you're doing pasta, you can do spaghetti squash or shirataki noodles. If you're doing skim milk, coconut milk or almond milk, Very simple things. And what's interesting is as you go through this process, so much of what we do every day is just habit, right? You tend to eat the same thing for breakfast, the same thing for lunch. It's a little different when you travel, but all this is is changing your habits. It's generally about a 10% shift that makes a massive change. I like to say these little hinges swing big doors. And the reason I have people eat from the plate is because there's a hormonal response when you eat in A balanced way. It's why higher fat diets make so much more sense. Because you can't eat a high protein diet, your body can't assimilate all that. And if you eat a high carbohydrate diet, you're going to be driving up blood sugar and insulin, which means you're going to be wanting to eat every couple of hours. And what happens when you eat that way over time is you actually turn your body into being a sugar burner and requiring eating every two to three hours. If you're one of those people that can't go more than two to three hours without eating, you've turned yourself into a sugar burner. If you're one of those people who cannot lose weight off your waist, that's a sign of a sugar burner. You want to move yourself back into being a fat burner where you can easily access stored fat for fuel and go five to six hours before you need to eat again. Super critical. And that starts with eating by the plate, which means clean protein, things like grass fed beef, wild salmon, pastured pork and chicken, healthy fats, avocado, coconut, raw nuts and seeds, non starchy vegetables and then slow, low carbs, things like wild rice and butternut squash, pumpkins, berries and fruit goes in there. And that's one of the things I did a podcast on a rant on fruit is not free food. Because somewhere along the line we got this idea that we could eat as much fruit as we want. Not the case fruit, one or two servings a day. And when I take people through my Sugar Impact diet, I actually take it down for two weeks, down to nothing. Because the more fructose you eat, the better your body gets at taking it straight to the liver and making fat at digesting it. And you do not want to be good at making fat, right, I'm assuming. Right, Right. Because if you want to be good at making fat, I can totally tell you how to do that one too. We can hack that one. I had to do one of my celebrity clients. I had to help them get ready for a Broadway show where they had to lose a lot of weight, then they had to gain a lot of weight. So I've always been fascinated by that. That's a super fun job to have because you want to make sure it's not just like, let's get you losing all your muscle and then adding all your fat. Let's do it the right way. But you can. If someone needed to gain 50 pounds of fat, you could do it very easily. Have them drink a ton of apple juice. You'll think about that if you were having apple juice as the afternoon snack. When I was putting together the Sugar impact diet, I was about ready to tell people to not even eat apples anymore. That's how much I went off the rails with this. But apples are okay because of the fiber and the nutrients in them, but not five of them, which is what you would do if you had apple juice. So when you eat this way with this plate, which is a higher fat, lower carb, not no carbs, lower carbs. I find people when they go on a super low carb or no carb diet, especially women, their cortisol tends to come up and they start to have higher elevated fasting blood sugars. And especially if we start to eat some carbs at night, it can help us sleep better and help men with testosterone. So this is not no carbs, it's not very low carb. It's a balanced carb, the right amount. And when you eat this way, you have a great hormone response. And again, remember, food is inflammation. This reduces inflammation and keeps blood sugar stable. Allows you to go four to six hours before you need to eat again. You don't have cravings. You can think straight. How does that sound? Do you want that? Okay. Because we try to do that with so many other things and it actually all starts with food. Food's the ultimate reset to me. Like, go figure out what else is wrong. So people say, you know, jj, I can't lose weight. And it all starts with food. Then we can start to talk about what you need to do with exercise. Because that's the next thing I see people doing wrong is like, they can't lose weight. When I was on Dr. Phil, I was on that for two years. And one season we did this weight loss challenge. And the people who lost the weight loss challenge were the people who insisted on doing the LA marathon. And it's funny because you look at marathon runners and they tend to have the same muscle mass as couch potatoes, very high stress thing to do. So along with eating correctly, the right types of foods, it's also important when you eat, which, which Dave alluded to yesterday. And one of the things that we know for sure is that if you can get yourself a good 12 to 14 hour fast, because I'm always looking at, what are these simple hacks that you can do that make a big shift, like starting the day with a shake rather than dessert, like making sure you get a nice 12 to 14 hour fast between dinner and Breakfast. Major difference. Chewing your food actually makes a major difference too. That's a big one. Back when I was a trainer, I. I used to have to always eat on the run. And I discovered one day that I wasn't even chewing. Like, I was just eating things and just so very careful chewing of food, but getting up in the morning, eating within an hour. I used to say eat within an hour of waking up. I kind of said an hour or two of waking up. I find with women, especially if we go too long, we start to get a little bit hangry. Anyone? I was speaking at Dave's conference two years ago and. And a bunch of people came over after I talked, and we were talking about the difference between men and women in intermittent fasting. Because when women intermittent fast, we actually become infertile, but we also become just mean in general. But guys, guys were meant to go out in the wild, go get stuff, bring it to us, right? And we have babies. We are wired differently. We've got intricate systems. We are Teslas. They are vws. It's very different. So women, hour or two when you get up in the morning. Quite often I will just do a simple. I mean, every single day, I start the day with a shake. One time I don't have it is here because my nutribullet blows up when I'm traveling overseas. But simple shake with a good clean protein source, some healthy fats, some fiber, easy to do. And I throw in vegetables too, because you can't even taste them. And then you want to eat every four to six hours again, right? Now, if you're one of those people who's fallen into that trap that you're supposed to snack and you're supposed to eat every two to three hours, which, by the way, the snacking industry created that for us. Like, there's a reason we have the little snack packs and stuff, okay? This was a created thing. We do not need to eat this way. We're not supposed to eat this way. Four to six hours. So then you stop eating three hours before bed. Now, any other place but here, that doesn't mean go to bed later. In the normal situation, we're going to bed at, like, 10, 11 and getting eight hours of sleep. All bets are off here. Forget it, okay? However, what you can do here is have dinner and then go dance your ass off. Perfect, right? But stop eating. There is no snack after that. Nothing. Okay? I don't want to see someone around old Mykonos town getting some, like, baklava at midnight. I'm Watching. I will be lurking around there. Now, what happens when you do this? And this is what's so powerful. Because has anyone ever done this? Like, you know, oh, I had a bad day yesterday. Anyone ever feel and beat yourself up, just kick your own butt, right? And I will never do that again. I'm awful. I suck. All that, like, internal dialogue, that doesn't help at all when you go through this process where you pull those foods out for three weeks, 100%. What I'll talk about in the workshop is that it has to be 100%, because even a little bit can trigger a firestorm of inflammation and set those cravings up all over again. When you do that, it allows you to connect the dots. Because what happens at the end of three weeks is you go back and you check in with each food one by one every couple of days, and you see how you feel. And you know what? It's a very different conversation with when you know that when you eat a muffin in the morning, your joints hurt all day long, or that you have to go to sleep in an hour, or you can't focus or your face breaks out, you don't go, you know, I think I'll have a little bit of that. Because now you've connected the dots between what you're eating and how you feel. And it shifted the conversation and put the power back into your hands. It's an amazing discovery, and it is the discovery that allows you to really take your health back. One of the things that I'm passionate about is that I believe that we, just like Robin talked about yesterday, need to be the CEO of our own health. Like I did with my son in the hospital was I decided, you know what, I'm in charge here, right? I am the CEO of this one. I'm going to take this back. The number one thing I see everywhere is that we are being held back in some way by our health. And that changing it is as simple as changing, changing what's at the end of your fork. And the biggest thing I want to leave you with is if you've heard this now, you can't unhear it. So think about what in here you can take away, whether it's eating by the plate, stopping eating, and giving yourself the 12 to 14 hour fast, pulling out the seven foods, starting the day with the shake. Because one simple shift can swing a big door and make sure then that you're ready. Whether it's an amazing opportunity or that you have to step up into something that you had no idea that you could handle. One of my favorite mentors said to me, she goes, you know, jj, never wish it was easier. Make yourself stronger. And that's what we've done. And that's why my son is today out there, big in the world. Thank you.