VIRGIN DIET by JJ Virgin

In. Why not just eat at a deficit?

^This.

So... do you have to be a virgin, or are you fed by virgins?

I'm in regardless.

Does this diet involve eating Virgins?

I am just about to start my 1st time of the Virgin Diet program, but I need to cut 4 days off the program (for a long story). I'm sure several of you will say that is not okay, but it's either cutting out 4 days or NOT doing it, so I'd like your advice. Would I be better off to cut out 4 days of Cycle 1 (meaning it is 17 days instead of 21)? Or would I better off to cut out the post-test days from each of the test food during Cycle 2? Or something else? Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks!

Unless you have an underlying medical condition, removing specific foods from your diet is unnecessary. Eating at a calorie deficit is all you need to focus on to lose weight.

IMO, demonizing certain things like this doesn't help solidify a healthy relationship with food, at all.

I always look up these diets to see what they are before commenting. This one is an elimination diet trying to spot food sensitivities with the argument that avoiding foods to which you have a sensitivity is a good idea. Recent research is showing that some folks are better able than others to realize the energy of different foods. In other words, I may actually metabolize more calories out of an apple than you do. The research on this is preliminary and its too soon to draw many conclusions but this has not stopped the diet industry from leaping ahead.

The problem is that like many others, this diet wraps up common food sensitivities with weight loss issues and then starts out with an eating plan that does lead to a temporary weight loss because it ends up being low calorie. You figure, "Gee, I lost weight. Therefore his theories must be right." Wrong. Correlation is not causality.

There is nothing magic about 17 or 21 days or the Virgin diet's "cycles" that cause you to lose weight. So in answer to your question? There is no answer. Do what works best for you.

Now, I'm the last one in the world to pooh-pooh food sensitivities. Removing such foods from my diet, which were identified via tine tests by a physician who was both an ENT and an allergist, resulted in curing my chronic sinus infections. Did I lose weight by eliminating tomatoes, onions, garlic, canteloupe, walnuts, etc. from my diet? Nah. The only way I lose weight is through taking in fewer calories than I expend.

So, have fun with the book and the program but don't expect it to solve any weight issues long term,

Does this diet involve eating Virgins?

I was wondering the same thing.

Rigger

From what I've read this sounds more like a simplified protocol for identifying foods to which individuals have a sensitivity. The claims about losing seven pounds in seven days are marketing puffery.

Simply put, when you overeat, your body stores surplus calories as fat. When you undereat, your body burns stored fat for energy.

It's an accepted fact that one pound of fat has approximately 3,500 calories of energy.

In order to lose one pound of fat, you therefore must burn approximately 3,500 calories more than you consume.

Considering average total daily energy expenditure is on the order of 2,000 calories (maybe 1,500, maybe 2,500, but that's a reasonable range), even if you ate nothing all day, you would only have a caloric deficit of 2,000 calories.

What this means is that you couldn't feasibly burn a pound of fat in a day, and by extension, could not burn 7 pounds in a week. You would have to eat nothing at all and exercise vigorously to exhaustion every single day of a week to hope to come anywhere close to that - - and that's just starvation, not weight loss.

The math just doesn't work - seven pounds in seven days is a vile little trick, and so I recommend you take anything else recommended by "Virgin" as highly suspicious.