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 Hoarders meets 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 here? Cheese, bread? I've seen you this morning eating. I know what's going on. So I've been 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've 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 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 is a code, there
is a system and I was determined to figure it out. And 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 that, "Oh, she's a quack, she's crazy," because I used
to say, you know, "Calories don't count," and people were like, "Of course, they do." All of the stuff that happens during that
time, I said, "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 was all about food intolerance which is what my workshop today is about. I knew that I had 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 advanced, less.
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 it 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 is 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, like, 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
much I'm holding firm. And the last words he said to me were, "I'm
not as strong as you think I am," and 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 the people
on the scene. That's what killed Princess Diana. He had multiple brain bleeds.
He was in a deep, deep coma, 9 Glasgow scores,
biggest coma you can have. He had 13 fractures. His femurs were sticking out of his thighs. When I saw him in 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, "It 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 he goes, "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 is so slim. And even if he survived the surgery, he'll
probably never wake up. There's a 0.25% Chance he'll make it." And my other son goes, "We will take those
odds." My other son is like Yoda. I mean, he's like this amazing brilliant kid
who at 15 was like, you know, keeping us all together that night.
And I looked around, I'm like, "Why are we
standing around? 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's going to be very different than if we just want 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're not there, really bad things. And so I'd get there around 5:30 a.M.
And
I'd leave at 9 at night but I knew one thing. When you're in the ICU, and using the pediatric
ICU, he's front and center in the pediatric ICU, you can't get sick. 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, 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 are like Superwoman." I go, you know, "I'm super healthy." I knew right then and there that I had to
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, and 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 that 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 am 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's in 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 realize 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 and we want the fastest
things you can do to change your health and change everything has changed what's at the
end of your fork.
So I started playing around with this and
doing food sensitivity testing. And 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 would 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 the 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 a 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're 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, you're older or under stress, those food particles go out
in circulation where they've no business being and your body launches an immune attack and
creates these antibodies that grab on to 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 about, the joint
pain, the headaches, the fatigue, the brain fog. And here's the worst part of it. 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've 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 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? - [Audience] Yes. - 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 in 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 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 the farmyard eating what chickens eat which apparently is everything. So there's 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 a 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, to have everyone start the day with a shake because
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. That's like a vat of honey, right? And by the way, honey, it's all natural, right? It's sugar. It doesn't matter if it's natural. It doesn't matter if it came with 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? No one's to admit to it? My fiance wanted to have the Cocoa Puffs but
he knew he was being watched. I was like, "Don't do that." 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 got
to 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 sugars over 90 consistently which I look at a lot of fasting blood sugars and
that's starting to become the new average, you've 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
is still up, the doors to your fat cells, they're locked. So you think at 10 in the morning, "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, "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. And if you keep your blood sugar up, you're
setting the stage for a lot of diseases, 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 U.S.
About no
added sugar and people are buying these jams and I go, "That's all sugar." And in the U.S., We can actually put things
that say, "No added sugar and we can use fruit juice concentrate,"which apple juice concentrate's
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, and 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 they 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 actually 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 and digesting it. And you do not want to be good at making fat,
right, I'm assuming? - Right? - Right. 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 information.
This reduces inflammation, 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? - Yes. - 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 because
all 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.
It's 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 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 used to have to
always eat on the run and I discovered one day that I wasn't even chewing. 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've 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 a bunch people came over after I talked and we were talking about, you know, the difference
between men and women in intermittent fasting. Because when women intermittent fast, we actually
can become infertile but we also become just mean in general, you know.
But 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're like, we've got intricate systems. We're Teslas, they're VWs, it's very different.
So women, an hour or two, you know, 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 a 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. And the normal situation, we're getting or
going to bed at like 10, 11 and getting 8 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.
- Yes. - 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 am 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, "Oh, I had a bad day yesterday."?Anyone,
ever feel like...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
dialog 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 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
when you know that when you eat a muffin in the morning, your joints hurt all day long
or that you, like, have to go to sleep in an hour or you can't focus.
I mean, 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's shifted the conversation and put the power
back into your hands. It's an amazing discovery. And it is a discovery that allows you to really
take your health back.
And 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. Because 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're being held back in some way by our health and that changing this is as simple as 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 a shake.
Because one simple shift can swing the 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.
[Music] .
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