Book ~ "The Virgin Diet Cookbook: 150 Easy and Delicious Recipes to Lose Weight and Feel Better Fast" (2014) JJ Virgin

From Goodreads ~ The companion to the New York Times bestseller The Virgin Diet brings the groundbreaking health and weight loss program into your kitchen. With more than 150 delicious and practical recipes, The Virgin Diet Cookbook, is designed to show you how to incorporate anti-inflammatory, healing foods into your diet to reclaim your health and reset your metabolism, while avoiding the 7 foods that are most likely to cause food intolerance. 

These tasty, easy-to-make recipes are free of gluten, soy, dairy, eggs, corn, peanuts, and sugar and artificial sweeteners. With mouthwatering suggestions for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and snacks, you'll lose weight fast while enjoying what you eat! The Virgin Diet Cookbook will also help you to stock your kitchen, provide delicious substitutes for common ingredients, and offer easy swaps for eating out and on-the-go.

I like reading books about getting healthy so was curious to see what this author's premise was.  Her claim is that if you drop seven foods, you'll lose seven pounds in seven days.

The seven foods you have to drop are:

1. Gluten - symptoms include weight gain, digestive upset, headaches, joint pain, anxiety and depression
2. Dairy - can make you fat, promote insulin resistance and foster acne and rosacea
3. Peanuts - high risk of aflatoxin mold
4. Eggs - symptoms include gas, bloating and heartburn
5. Corn - can show up as rashes and hives, joint pain, mood disorders, temporary depression, insomnia, eczema, fatigue, hyperactivity in children, night sweats, dark circles around the eyes, recurring ear and urinary tract infections and sinus problems
6. Soy - symptoms include thyroid function, reproductive disorders, cognitive decline and digestive problems
7. Sugar and artificial sweeteners - sugar spikes and crashes your blood sugar, disrupts your insulin metabolism, raises your stress hormones (so you burn less fat), feeds bad gut bacteria and candida, depresses your immune system, makes you better at story fat, depletes nutrients, creates cravings for more; artificial sweeteners are toxic chemicals

And it's not just about not eating these things but also not eating foods that have them as ingredients ... so you really have to read labels.

There are three cycles:

1. Cutting all the seven foods out for 21 days (you can keep doing this cycle until you are within five pounds of your goal)
2. Adding the seven foods back in one at a time to test your system to see which one(s) you can tolerate
3. Maintenance

Included are three-week meal plans (including recipes and shopping lists) for different lifestyle scenarios including:

• Extra-fast weight loss
• Managing blood sugar
• Vegetarians and vegans
• Travel
• Feeding a family
• Paleo followers
• Eating on a budget

This way of eating sounds like it would make sense.  But I'm kind of a fussy eater and don't like a lot of the foods that I am supposed to use as replacements (for example, instead of having mashed potatoes, you should have mashed cauliflower instead ... Gord did this last week and I tried it but didn't like it).  Though I personally would find this way of eating hard, I have come away with some changes that I can make to my life.