So, you’ve got your workout plan.

You’re doing HIIT trainings, 1000x crunches a day, and pushing your heart-rate to the max in hopes of burning more calories.

And maybe you’re already seeing some results… (Hello six-pack, we’ve missed you!)

Next, you need to examine your diet and figure out what you can do to improve your food choices so you can “burn fat” 24/7 sustainably (No, if you’ve read this site long enough, you should know that I do not advocate crash diets) *without* spending an insane amount of time at the gym.

This goes along with a broader point I made last year: despite the number of hours people are working out, many are not getting results.

Today I’m going to share with you 1 inspiring story from someone who has been there, done that, lost 100 pounds in 6-months (yes he was around 280 pounds) and maintained his weight, *without* hardcore exercising or severely restricting calories.

Professor Spira, the Founder of Mucus-Free Life LLC and editor/annotator of the newly released Prof. Arnold Ehret’s Mucusless Diet Healing System: Annotated, Revised, and Edited by Prof. Spira, and author of Spira Speaks: Dialogs and Essays on the Mucusless Diet Healing System (full bio at the bottom of this article), is here to share with us:

• How he lost 100 pounds in six-months, regained his energy and health, without feeling hungry or severely restricting his carb intake
• Why he teaches the mucus-free diet and what it entails (No this is completely different from the Paleo and Atkins diet)
• Four tactics to gradually transition to a healthier diet
• Why many of you may still have cravings for cheese and other fatty products, and what to do about it

Let the fun begin!

Q: Thanks a lot of taking the time to speak with us. Why don’t you tell us more about your background and how you got involved with your current work?

Professor Spira: Very nice to be here and talk with you. I got into the mucusless diet a little over 12 years ago as I was pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Trombone Performance at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio.

During my first year at the College-Conservatory of Music, I met someone called Brother Air aka Willie Smart. Willie had practiced the Mucusless Diet Healing System for almost 30 years.

I was playing music with him for a long time and he really didn’t talk too much about the diet with me until one day he was sitting near my friend and I while we were eating. Willie just couldn’t hold it back anymore. He started telling us about the Mucusless Diet Healing System.

I got the book, read it and started applying the principles. The rest is history. It changed our lives tremendously.

How Professor Spira Lost 100 Pounds in 6 Months, With only Moderate Exercise

Q: You talked about your weight loss journey, so can you tell us about yourself before and after? What was the process like?

Professor Spira: I was always fairly big and I was a gluttonous eater. I will own that. I over ate.

I didn’t only eat foods that I would consider not to be optimal foods now, I ate a lot of it.

I would just stuff myself, so I got heavier and heavier the older I got.

As a football player, I pumped iron every day and over ate to compensate. At the end of high school, I was about 250 pounds.

Then in college I gained about 30 pounds because I wasn’t working out as much anymore. I was practicing my trombone all the time, and just ate.

So I got to about 280 pounds; I was starting to get obese. I would look in the mirror and saw that I was getting a double chin. I was really starting to pick up that weight.

I had tried to lose the weight. I had tried the gimmicky things – diet pills, workout plans, etc.

Nothing really made sense until I read the mucusless diet and then something clicked.

I thought, “This makes sense. No wonder I was having trouble losing weight. No wonder I had chronic migraine headaches all the time and mucus problems and all this kind of stuff.”

Then it was within months of starting the diet I gradually transitioned. There was nothing really cold turkey or extremist about what I did.

I slowly got off of the worst foods, got on better foods, started eating vegetables because I didn’t even eat vegetables before that. And within six months I’d lost about 100 pounds.

Q: You lost 100 pounds in six-months?

Professor Spira: Yeah.

Q: Were you working out like five times a week or…?

Professor Spira: I did not work out much.

I was practicing my trombone all the time and studying. I mainly walked around.

I worked out maybe a couple of times a week on some weights and stuff, but it wasn’t the working out that really had anything to do with the weight loss..

My trombone teacher used to see me every week for trombone lesson and he didn’t say anything about me losing weight until I’d already lost all the weight. It was about six months later and he was like, “Did you lose some weight?”

I was like, “You’ve been seeing me every week. You didn’t notice I lost all this weight?”

It happened so gradually that some people didn’t even notice it.

Q: Other than losing weight, did you feel more energy? Did you feel more alert?

Professor Spira: Yeah. I felt so much better just getting off of meat products. It took a good six months before I was totally off.

I was mostly off of meat the first three months. By six months, I was totally off all animal products. It’s an unexplainable feeling to go from the way I felt, because I didn’t know why I felt that bad.

There’s this kind of anxiety, pent-up kind of stimulation and stuff that goes along with all the flesh eating. However, I didn’t know that until I had started eliminating meat from my diet.

Big Bone Myth?

After eliminating all that waste, I felt light as a feather. It was just incredible for me because I was under the impression that I was big boned.

That myth of “I’m just naturally a big person” was not true: I look fine skinnier and I felt better. It was a great experience going through that transformation.

What is the mucus-free diet?

Q: Awesome. Tell us a little bit more about the mucus-free diet. What is mucus? Why does having mucus affect our health negatively?

Professor Spira:

The Mucusless Diet Healing System, in a nutshell, is basically a system to gradually and progressively move away from mucus-forming foods to foods that do not create any mucus.

The foods that create mucus… they decompose into slimy substances in the body. Take a piece of meat or something like rice as examples. You can melt rice down and it becomes this very sticky substance. This sticky substance is mucus.

People also make sticky substance (i.e. glue) out of horse stuff, and even Jell-O comes from the animal product gelatin.

This slime builds up in the intestines over time because it doesn’t get digested and eliminated properly. Another part of what I did was regular colon irrigation. In the beginning, as I was transitioning, all of this crazy mess was coming out of me.

That’s the thing, people might think they are regular and healthy, but they may actually be fairly constipated because the intestines have not eliminated this stuff.

And you start to get decade-old of feces stones out; this waste just builds up over time.

By following the mucusless diet and changing to more mucus-free foods, you start to eliminate the mucus.

But the key is the transition diet, which is what a lot of people miss out on. People just skip over that part of the book or don’t understand it.

How to Slowly Transition into a Healthier Diet

Q: On your transition to the mucus-free diet, you said you gradually lost those 100 pounds. Can you tell us how you slowly transitioned? Can you walk us through the transition period and why it’s so crucial?

Professor Spira: First, I stopped eating out. There are some mucus diet practitioners that do eat in restaurants or they will just get the salad or go to a vegan place or whatever. But for me, with the kind of addiction that I had to those kinds of places, it was best that I just leave it behind all together.

Secondly, I got into my favorite vegetables. My favorite vegetable at that time was broccoli. I’d make onion sauté, steam some broccoli, put the broccoli in there, chop up a bunch of cabbage and make this kind of cabbage, vegetable sauté.

I would make these big tomato sauces, combine it all with a raw lettuce salad, and to me that was so satiating. If I was craving meat, I would make some 100% wheat spaghetti and just eat it along with the salad and cooked vegetables.

I didn’t really miss the meat. I didn’t miss that stuff and eventually, I didn’t even want the spaghetti anymore. All I wanted was my cooked vegetables with tomato sauce and a big salad and I was good.

Thirdly, I bought a juicer. I collected fruit from the school café and ended up with a stack of apples and oranges in my room, and just juiced. And that was the first experience I really had juicing all the time. That was another big part to this. It was apple juice and orange juice and all that. I just went crazy because it tasted so good.

It blew my mind because, if you are used to drinking the store-bought juices and, what we call cooked juices I guess now that kind of thing, when you make fresh juice, there is just nothing like that.

I was like, “This is better than everything else I’m doing, than I’m eating.” Then it started occurring to me, I wish I could just live on this juice.

Eventually that urge turned into me being able to do fairly long term periods of juice fasting, and it felt great when I did it. Of course, it was something that happened naturally for me as a result of getting cleaner. I certainly don’t promote or teach long-term fasting for people who have no experience eating mucus-free or doing short-term fasts.

Fourthly, I also included other vegetarian items. A couple of times, I might have went and got some processed vegan foods and had a soy burger here and there, or a “nature burger.”

Some of that stuff worked itself in, but I always knew that that was not going to be a long-term staple.

I knew that that was not something on a mucus-less diet path that I would want to eat for extended periods of time and be very comfortable eating. This is what differentiates between a lot of vegans and then somebody that’s on the mucus-less diet path.

It’s not that we won’t eat some of those foods, just that we don’t eat them for a long period of time.

Q: You didn’t miss any of your, say, cheese or dairy or meat during the whole process at all, the six months?

Professor Spira: In the beginning as I’m just getting off of it within that first month or first couple of months, I would still have cravings.

But what really helped me, honestly, was doing those lemon juice and distilled water enemas, because you only crave these poisons as long as the residue of those poisons are in your system.

So as I started to really clear out a lot of that old junk, my craving for those things went away and I started to crave the fruits and crave the vegetables more and more.

So yeah, there was no doubt about it, it was hard in the very beginning but definitely got easier and easier to the point where those old foods, I didn’t recognize them as food anymore.

It was basically like I would not be attracted to them nor look at them as food in the same way that I would not look at Clorox bleach as food. I don’t go to into the Clorox bleach aisle and get thirsty or get hungry.

I just don’t identify it as food and that’s what happened with meat and dairy. It just wasn’t something that I would even consider as being something to put into my body.

At a certain point, you have to find mucus-forming foods that are not as bad as what you used to eat. When I was getting off of meat, I got into 100% wheat spaghetti and beans as I progressed. These foods are still mucus-forming but they are nowhere near as bad as dead animal flesh.

As I progressed, I ate more raw salads and started getting into cooked vegetables that were mucus free. Stuff like really well baked sweet potato, baked squash, and things like that are fairly mucus free, and so I was getting into those types of foods.

As I got cleaner and cleaner, I started experimenting more with fasting and getting into periods where I did eat anything except fruit for periods of time. But I would go back to eating vegetables. I would never do anything really extreme where it felt like I was making myself hungry or anything like that.

I just never experienced hunger on this diet and when people say that they do, they are not doing it right. They are not transitioning properly.

That’s the end of part 1 of this interview.

In part 2 of this interview, we’ll be talking about:

• Why the mucus-free diet maybe the ultimate immunity diet
• How the mucus-free system helps one detox
• The importance of the transition period
• Professor Spira’s thoughts on the diet’s safety and if it was related to Steve Job’s death (Is the diet too extreme?)

Stay tuned HERE for Part 2 of the interview. 

About The Interviewee:

Prof. Spira is an author, musician, and expert consultant on the Mucusless Diet Healing System. Within 6 months of learning about Arnold Ehret’s Mucusless Diet while in college, Spira lost 110 pounds and overcame his major ailments, including chronic migraine headaches, yearly bouts of bronchitis, sleep apnea, and allergies.

Since his transformation, he has revived Ehret’s works and helped thousands of people learn how to transition toward mucus-free lifestyles. In 2014, Spira started Mucus-free Life LLC, which currently publishes several books including Prof. Arnold Ehret’s Mucusless Diet Healing System: Annotated, Revised, and Edited by Prof. Spira, SpiraSpeaks: Dialogs and Essays on the Mucusless Diet, and Rational Fasting.

You can visit Prof. Spira‘s blog here. To learn more about Spira‘s mucus-free health coaching services, click here. To get paperback and Kindle versions of Spira’s books on Amazon, click here.