JJ Virgin had her first light bulb moment 20 years ago that led her to where she is now: a triple-board certified health expert, Fitness Hall of Famer, 4-time New York Times best-selling author, and passionate advocate of eating and exercising smarter.
JJ spent years doing hands-on research, working with doctors and clients and taking dozens of grad school and certification courses. She discovered that by finding your food and carb intolerances and working out a whole lot less, you can create a healthy lifestyle customized to your personal body chemistry and needs.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with JJ Virgin about health and fitness and how writing a book can lead to an empire.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How staying away from certain foods can make you healthy and feeling great.
- How being coachable and finding the smartest person to listen to can bring you the success you seek.
- Why it’s important to continually create content and be visible to your audience.
- How working towards a healthy lifestyle today will prepare you for anything unforeseen that lies ahead.
- What writing a book can do for you, and your business, and the goals you want to achieve.
Connect with JJ:
Links Mentioned:
ms350.io/book
Jjvirgin.com
Guest Contact Info:
Email
ea@mindsharesummit.com
Twitter
@jjvirgin
Instagram
@jj.virgin
Facebook
facebook.com/JJVirginOfficial
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/jjvirgin
Rob Kosberg:
Hey welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here. I have a fantastic guest for you. Someone who is very well known, I think you’re going to absolutely fall in love with. I’m glad to have JJ Virgin with us on the Publish Promote Profit podcast. JJ is a celebrity fitness expert, a four time New York Times bestselling author, as well as bestselling author on all the other lists for a number of her other books. She’s the CEO and founder of a company called Mindshare, which brings together the brightest minds in the field. I’m really interested in that as well. Of course, you’ve been on everything; Good Morning America, Today Show, Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, and now Publish Promote Profit. I am really happy to have you on. I have a number of things that I’m wondering about. You’ve heard these questions maybe a hundred times. Maybe you’ve heard them all a hundred times, but you’ve been doing this a long time and you’ve been doing it at a really high level for a long time. What honestly motivates you to continue doing what you’re doing? It’s certainly not the money at this point. It’s something more than that. Can you maybe talk about that a little bit?
JJ Virgin:
I’m actually more excited today about what I’m doing than I think I’ve ever been. I think we’re actually really lucky. So, I’ve literally been doing this 35 plus years. There’s so much cool stuff. You look back to when I first started and I used TV as a medium back then, because there wasn’t really anything else. I was doing talks for three people in a pharmacy, and then I was doing the local TV show. I was doing whatever I could. It’s so different now with what you can do, which is good and bad because back then you got on TV and you were a famous celebrity. Now everyone can have their own TV channel and it’s so noisy. There are always the opportunities and then the challenges with it. There are constantly new changes in marketing and what you’re able to do, and then there’s new science. In the field of nutrition, I came out with a line 25 years ago, “Your body isn’t the bank account to chemistry lab,” which at the time you would’ve thought I was saying, “You know what, they’re wrong? The Earth is flat.” I was talking about how calories are not the only thing and that if you want to lose weight, it’s not about eating less and exercising more. People thought I was crazy. Now it’s kind of standard. Actually, it’s not totally standard yet, which is shocking to me, but there’s always new science. There’s always cool new stuff. There’s new marketing stuff and new science. It keeps it fun and keeps the challenge alive. I think also, when you have a big, big mission out there, even from the start, yes at the very beginning, my biggest goal, my big mission was to not have to go live with my parents or have to get a job at an office. That was my big, hairy, audacious goal. “Do not get job at office. Don’t have to wear a suit,” but I graduated from college, I had full-blown business in my final year of college. So, that was never going to be an issue but once you get past that point and you start to think about, “Okay, what are the big things that I could do,” then the mission takes over. As you said, it’s gets far past the money. There’s been plenty of times along the way where, I literally couldn’t afford grapes for my kids. That was a luxury. This isn’t like someone had hit me with a little magic fairy wand and said, “You are going to have this.” This has been a long bumpy road with a lot more skinned knees than not.
Rob Kosberg:
I appreciate that. That’s real talk right there. From the original goal of having a business in general and not having to move back in with family after college, to now the bigger picture and mission. Talk to me a little bit about the idea of food intolerance. The issue is not so much calories in, calories out, but there’s this food intolerance issue. How did you like come up with that? It was a little bit of the, world is flat idea at that time. You were standing all by yourself on that pedestal.
JJ Virgin:
It’s interesting. They’ve used elimination diets in medicine for decades, decades, and decades. They’re really clunky, and hard to follow, and they never made a whole lot of sense to me, but the outcomes could be pretty amazing. They’re hard to do. I was working with a company and I was using lab testing, some very specific, kind of different, novel lab testing and teaching doctors how to use these labs in their practice. One of the labs was a food sensitivity test. I was teaching doctors and literally going into the practice and showing them how to do it. Patients would walk in and they would complain of gas, and bloating, and joint pain, and headaches, and fatigue, and they’d have auto-immune diseases, and they couldn’t lose weight, but that was kind of a, “Oh, by the way,” and we would do this food sensitivity test. Now, this didn’t test for gluten intolerance. We did that in another way. Basically, what I discovered from the test was that the same foods always showed up and they were at the top of the list. They were dairy and eggs. The next level were soy corn and peanuts. What would happen is the test would take three weeks to come back. During that time, we were just sitting there waiting. I thought, “You know what? It’s always those foods.” Gluten was another test and it always showed up. It also created the leaky gut, the food intolerance that was happening, so I thought, “I’m just going to pull those foods out while they’re waiting.” It didn’t dawn on me at the time, that came later, but I thought “Well, why don’t you just skip the test altogether?” I pulled those foods out. They would come back in three weeks to get their test results and they’d be like, “I feel amazing.” Their joint pain was gone, their headaches were gone, and the brain fog was gone. The average person was losing seven pounds in the first week. Over and over, hundreds of people were doing this. I decided, “I’m going to do this without the test and see what happens,” and lo and behold, I’m getting just as good of results. They’re feeling great. After three weeks, since they’d had time to feel what feeling good really feels like I go, “All right, now let’s test back the foods and you see how you feel.” You connect the dots, you become your own health detective, your own nutritionist.” Then I thought, “Well, I’ll do this online. I’ll do this myself.” So, I did it as an online program. The only challenge was, I hadn’t pulled out sugar because sugar wasn’t something that you’d have this type of a food sensitivity or food intolerance to, but sugar was creating a lot of the leaky gut problems that were leading to it. If you don’t pull sugar out and you pull the other foods out, guess what people eat? Sugar. It started as dropping six foods. It moved to dropping seven foods, which is actually a way cooler title tagline than drop six, right? “Drop six foods, just six days, lose six pounds,” isn’t quite as sexy. It was crazy how it all worked so well. I had an agent and I was on a TV show called Freaky Eaters at the time. She was like, “You’ve got to write a book.” I said, “I want to write a book about weight loss resistance and all the things that get in the way of you losing weight and cause you to gain weight. Thyroid and insulin resistance and toxins and genetics,” and she’s like, “Just write that food, that food intolerance thing.” I was like, “But that’s only one thing,” and she goes, “Just do that simple, simple message.” She got me out of my way. I credit the majority of my success in life to being coachable. Find the smartest person and listen to them. You can iterate later. The very first thing that I always do, like when I did my first book launch, I worked with Brendan Burchard, and I coach with him personally. He told me exactly what to do. I did exactly what he told me to do. I did not think I knew better. I just duplicated what he told me to do and guess what? I got the same results as him. After that I could iterate, because I’d had the ideas I saw where I could make things a little bit better for my market. After that, I totally innovated. I think where people go wrong is, they see something, they haven’t tried it and they think that they can do it better without having actually even done it themselves.
Rob Kosberg:
Oh, I love that; being coachable. The whole food and tolerance thing that you talked about and over seven days. I’ve read through your book. It has thousands of positive reviews. It wasn’t your first book. In fact, I think you did a book just the year before.
JJ Virgin:
It wasn’t even my second book. Well, I did a book the year before, but then I did a book the year before that. That is a really important lesson. The first book I ever did, I was dating someone, and my little hackles should have gone up at the very beginning. I remember when I was first meeting him, and at the time I’d done the show called, You Are What You Eat. It was going to be an ABC prime-time TV show. It was a pilot. Well, it never ended up airing. He was watching that, and he goes, as a screenwriter he goes, “Oh my gosh, I could sell all this. Let’s write a book,” and I go, “Okay.” I was super green. I had never worked with an attorney and he had me sign a contract. I didn’t pay any attention. It’s 50/50. The contract basically gives them 50% of anything I do for the rest of my life. I learned a very important lesson early in the game. So, I sign it, we write the book, I get a book deal from one of the people I spoke for at the time was HCI. They did chicken soup for the soul. They offered a book deal. He at the time said, “I don’t want to do that. Let’s self-publish.” What was really interesting was because of that, one of my other friends said, “You should go sit down with Dr. Joe Mercola. He’s doing a lot of cool stuff like this too. He might be able to give you some advice.” So, I went to dinner with Joe and Joe said, “JJ, the money is in the list,” and I’m like, “Joe, what list are we talking about?” I had been on Dr. Phil for two years. That little box you put on your website, I didn’t have one on there. There was no money in the list because there was no list. He said, “What you need to do is read the Four-Hour Workweek.” I read the four hour workweek. I think there must be a hidden chapter two that I miss, because I was like, I worked 80 hours a week. I was like, “What have I missed here, Tim?” In that book, he talks about Dan Kennedy. I love Dan Kennedy. I went and started studying him. What was interesting as I’m going and listened to Dan Kennedy stuff again, and he was doing an interview with this gal, Allie Brown and Allie Brown, I was like, “Oh, finally, a woman.” Not a guy with the weird bushy hair and the sideburns. I was like, “She’s like me.” I ended up going to her event, signing up for her mastermind. That is where a whole lot of this stuff happened, getting into a mastermind, making decisions. The first book I did, I did when I was in her mastermind. I remember thinking, “This is going to be a New York Times bestseller.” The whole way the book happened was, I was at her mastermind and I’m known for my arms. I was at our mastermind, and sleeveless, and someone for the 50,000th time was like, “Where did you get your arms?” I was at a business event and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is my book.” I went like literally, “I should do six weeks of sleeveless and sexy.” I called my then manager. He sent a book proposal writer to my hotel. We wrote it. I went to New York a week later. I sat down at Simon and Schuster for lunch with this woman and took off my jacket. She said, “I want it.” I learned a lot from that because that’s not how you sell a book. You don’t take the first offer. It was $50,000. I literally was walking down the streets in New York city thinking I made it. I remember being like, “Oh my gosh, I’m in New York City. I have a book deal.” Not knowing that when a book publisher gives you that minuscule amount of money, that they’re just kind of taking that deal off the table so no one else will get it. They’re not going to put any time or effort into it. It was a really challenging thing, but to me, it was perfect. It was my training wheels. I learned a whole lot from that book as to what not to do. When I did the Virgin Diet, we did everything right. We did an auction, we got a great advance. I put all these events into marketing. I hired Brendan Burchard. I did a public television show. I just was like, “Now I’m going to do it.” That was not by accident. Like that’s the thing. I have people ping me and go, “Hey, can we talk? I really want to do a New York Times bestseller.” I’m like, “Why?” They’ll say, “I’ve got a book coming out. Can you help me with that New York Times bestseller?” So, I go, “When’s your book coming out?” They go, “Next week.” I’m writing a book that’s coming out in November 2022 and I am working on the marketing now. It is the first thing that I did – outline the marketing. If you don’t have a way to market a book, if there’s not an audience for it, guess what?
Rob Kosberg:
You have a large list. Now you have a tremendous following and yet you still need to prepare that far in advance for your book to be as big as you want it to be.
JJ Virgin:
People are fickle. You’re only as good as your last thing. Just because I have a list doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy this book. It’s got to fit in with what they need. It’s got to be important for them. You know what? They’ll all leave tomorrow if I wasn’t showing up and taking care of them. If you’re going to create a community, you have a responsibility to that community and you have to keep showing up, and showing up, and showing up. One big book doesn’t set you. It can make the difference in your brand forever, but it doesn’t set you up for the rest of your life. It doesn’t mean your brand is going to stay alive for the rest of your life; if you publish a book and then go hide in a cave.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s the same with one big TV appearance, or even a TV show or any of those things. It’s the same exact idea.
JJ Virgin:
I was on Dr. Phil for two years, every week. People don’t remember that.
Rob Kosberg:
Good thing you eventually put that little box on the bottom of the website. Let me ask you about another book. I think it’s the most recent one you did, but I could be wrong. I actually started reading it, Warrior Mom. I have three boys. I’ve been married for 30 years and I can’t imagine what you must have gone through. For those that don’t know, your son was in a hit and run accident.
JJ Virgin:
When he was crossing the street a couple of weeks before the Virgin Diet was coming out. That’s not in the book because my publisher goes, “If we put that in the book, no one’s going to believe any of this.” The real backstory is, I published the Virgin Diet, sitting bedside with my son in a coma. I will tell you, when I’m sitting bedside, my son’s in a coma, and I am committing to him that I’m going to do whatever it takes to get him to be 110%. The book being successful is no longer optional. My friends were like, Allie Brown said, “Oh, now I know what you’re going to do.” I’m like, “Damn straight.” This book is going to help my son because you know, eight years to get him back. This was 13 fractures, torn aorta, multiple brain bleeds, deep coma. He had to start all over again. He had to learn how to talk, how to read, how to walk, everything. That takes a lot of time and energy. His dad’s is the most amazing Saint ever.
Rob Kosberg:
How is grant is now?
JJ Virgin:
Grant is great. Grant’s in Florida too. The only thing I really notice now is some memory stuff, but I’m pushing them now on that. He’ll go, “Ask dad,” I’m like, “I’m asking you. Don’t ask me to ask dad. You’ve got this.” He’s doing really well. My agent went through all this with me of course. Brendan Burchard went through all this with me. He flew in to help me with the book launch. When we get all through this, my agent starts pestering me about this book and I go, “I don’t want to write that book.” She goes, “You have to write this book.” She actually had already named it, Miracle Mindset. That’s an interesting story for an author because it published versus Miracle Mindset. I just never liked that title. It didn’t fit for me. It’s interesting because Grant’s name means warrior. I said to him early on in the hospital, when I discovered that I go, “Grant, you’re a warrior. You know?” I was doing an interview with Dr. Mark Hyman for Broken Brain, the documentary and they said, “We had to have you on, you’re such a Warrior Mom,” and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that is the title of the book. I kept looking for it. There it is.” I told the publishers, I go, “We have to change this. This is the book.” They let me do it. I think that’s an important thing too. Titles matter a lot.
Rob Kosberg:
Covers and titles do. It’s sad to me. It didn’t look like the book had quite the audience that I thought it should have.
JJ Virgin:
It really hasn’t had the audience, but here’s what I will tell you about that book that’s interesting. I think there’s a couple lessons in there. Number one, I’m a diet book author. I’m in the pigeonholed place of the diet book author. That’s how people see me. However, that book will have the longevity. It’s interesting. That book actually gets me more speaking engagements, more recognition. Even though the other books are the books that have sold way more copies, have way more ratings, everything else, that book is the book that gets me recognition. We do not connect on, “Wow, I’m following that diet. You’re following that diet.” We connect from those places of total vulnerability, our humanity, our wounds, and that book shifted everything for me out there in the world. It’s the story I tell.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s amazing. I want to hear more about that because obviously I talk to my authors about this. The average author, even someone that has a successful business doesn’t have the platform that you had coming. They don’t have two years on Dr. Phil and the various other things. It’s amazing what they can do when they write the correct book. That’s really what you’re saying right now. What kind of doors did it open? How has it changed opportunities for you? You already had a lot of opportunities, but what has it done beyond that?
JJ Virgin:
You know, it’s interesting. I’ve spoken to a lot of brain injury associations, which is obviously kind of a pet project now. I think if someone’s looking at, “Gosh, I want to have a health speaker,” and they’re looking at other health speakers and they’re looking at me and they’ve read that other book, I get chosen. When they hear that story, like when I’m going to do a health talk, now I always weave that story in because what the real important thing there, and when I was out with the Virgin Diet, the first couple of weeks in the hospital, as I’m getting ready to do the launch, I thought, “You know what? This is way bigger than I realized.” I’m so used to being in the diet world and people going, “Oh, I’ll start tomorrow.” I thought, “Gosh, I walked into the situation with Grant where I’m under the most tremendous amount of stress you could possibly be under and I walked in with my health at a hundred percent.” What if I had been one of those people saying, “I’ll start tomorrow,” and I hadn’t been at the peak of my game to be able to handle that level of stress. I just realized this is so much more important. If you’re saying you’re going to start tomorrow, we never know. We all know we’re going to have challenges. You don’t get to pick when they are. If this last year has shown us anything, you better build your resilience muscle. You better stay super healthy because the people who were healthy at their ideal body weight, taking vitamin D, are in far better place than the people who weren’t, who are waiting till tomorrow to start their program.
Rob Kosberg:
I totally agree. So much of what you just shared has to do with physical mind health. You must have struggled with some resentment, some emotional stuff. I just think how I would feel about one of my sons going through that. You don’t come across to me as anything but a really positive, amazing person. Most people that have a lot of hate and anger and resentment in the heart. You can tell that pretty fast. I guess I’m asking, how did you deal with that?
JJ Virgin:
When I was 30, I had a mentor and I thought she was going to teach me how to be successful in business. I actually sold my personal training business in LA, dropped out of doctoral school, moved in with her in Florida. That’s when I moved to Fort Lauderdale. She did not teach me for six months; she didn’t teach me business. She taught me mindset. She started with rubber bands on my wrist. She says, “Anytime you have a limiting belief, snap, your wrists. Say cancel, cancel. The only limitations are the limitations in your mind.” That was so ingrained in me that when they gave grant a 0.25% chance of making it, it was like, “Well, that’s not zero.” I only saw the 0.25. You know, I told him he’d be 110%. The nurses and the doctors kind of looking at me like, “Mom’s crazy.” When they came in and said, “We’re just trying to get him so he could potentially walk again,” I go, “Treat them like you got Kobe Bryant in this bed. You wouldn’t be saying that to him.” That was so who I was. It was so who my kids were that that’s just how we knew to be. It’s interesting because when I went to sell Miracle Mindset to the publishers, they’re like, “Yeah, but you’re not a mindset author.” I go, “Every book that I write, if you really read the books, the first thing I talk about is that you have to see it to believe it. You have to believe it to see it. You have to believe it first in your mind, you have to actually be able to see it in your mind’s eye. You have to be so clear on who your future self is and actually feel into that right now and be there and then start putting those, all that mindset in place to do it.” That’s how I’ve lived this entire time. Were there times when I got frustrated? Yes, but I wasn’t resentful. There were a couple of times I got really scared because there was no clear idea that he was going to make it sometimes. I mean, he nearly died multiple times. There was no indicator. Even as I was writing Warrior Mom, there were a couple of times in there where he tried to kill himself, which is really common with the brain injury. I thought, “Wow, I’m writing a book that might have a really different ending.” I realized that book was not about my son making it. The book was about how you show up through difficult times. That was so ingrained in me that it wasn’t something I had to think about. That’s super important because if you, during a difficult time, have to start thinking, “Okay, now what do I need to do for my mindset?” You’re screwed. You got to do it now.
Rob Kosberg:
I just love talking to you. This is awesome. I kind of choked up listening to you talk about your son. Having boys, myself, I know what it’s like. I guess just congratulations. I’m really happy for you. I’m happy for your success, but more than that, just the mindset that you had to get your son healed and healthy. I’m sure we’ll see another chapter to that as well, which will be kind of cool. That’s probably a good place for us to end. Where can I send people? You obviously have the Mindshare.
JJ Virgin:
So, Mindshare is our group for healthcare professionals for building their brands. If there are docs and health experts out there listening, I also have a great thing I did on how to do a book, which I’m happy to give to you that you can share with them. I can give you that link. That’s an easy one. It’s ms350.io/book. I do a lot of teaching on all the things that I’ve done to use books to build my brand. The consumer side is JJvirgin.com.
Rob Kosberg:
Fantastic. Good. Thank you so much, JJ. So, so great to be with you.
JJ Virgin:
Thank you. See ya.
