Spice up your love life with the great sex diet

Beyond food
“A healthy, balanced diet sets the table for being sexually satisfied,” explains Marrena Lindberg, author of “The Orgasmic Diet: A Revolutionary Plan to Lift Your Libido and Bring You to Orgasm” (Crown). “But to get to the next level, you actually have to do a bit more.”

Lindberg is not a doctor. She is a data-mining programmer with a degree in mathematics from Brown University who became an amateur clinical researcher to test her theories. Her first subject? Herself. Years ago, Lindberg was one of the many women who struggle to orgasm. She was deeply unhappy and stuck in an erotically unsatisfying marriage. Even so, she did want to have a child. To prepare for a pregnancy, Lindberg weaned herself off the antidepressants she’d been prescribed and improved her diet. Once pregnant, she started taking fish oil supplements at a nutritionist’s recommendation. Then, after she gave birth, Lindberg began doing pubococcygeus (PC) exercises to strengthen her weakened vaginal muscles. The surprise result of all these adjustments: Lindberg became spontaneously orgasmic. Spontaneously, as in she was driving her car, listening to the radio, tightening her PC muscles to the beat and then — bam! — she climaxed, right there on the highway.

The combination of supplements, dietary changes and vaginal fitness apparently did the trick. Lindberg began an extended period of trial and error, experimenting with dosages and cranking up her PC workout routine until she reached her maximum orgasm potential with her husband. “Now I’m continually orgasmic during sex,” she says. “Every three or four thrusts, I have an orgasm. Dozens in a row. I’m not telling women they should be like me. I’m making up for lost time, like a polio kid who grows up to be a marathoner. I’m just trying to get the information out there so women can empower themselves sexually.” Since she first shared her experience online five years ago, men have flocked to meet her, driven by curiosity, she explains, adding, “I’m 41, overweight and not especially attractive, but I receive an amazing amount of male attention.”

Sign. Me. Up! Not for the hordes of drooling men trying to get to know me, but for that continuous vaginal-orgasm action. Although my clitoris was reliable, I’d had fewer G-spot orgasms than I could count on one hand. Lindberg assured me I could improve on that. Her promise that, on her plan, clitoral orgasms would happen more quickly, in addition to being longer and deeper, also intrigued me.

Daily supplements
Despite their chemical complexity, Lindberg’s theories are pretty simple: She contends that increasing your level of “free testosterone” — women do produce small quantities of testosterone — may fuel friskiness. Because magnesium and zinc counteract the effect of a protein in your blood that binds with the hormone, Lindberg advocates adding more of these minerals to your diet to help increase the free testosterone circulating in your bloodstream and ramp up your desire. Taking the recommended daily allowance of 1,000 milligrams of calcium, 320 mg of magnesium and 8 mg of zinc (the three minerals can be taken in one pill) can help put you in the mood, she says. In addition, she suggests downing a good multivitamin daily (with even more of the trifecta), to meet all your antioxidant and iron needs, as well as a glass of orange juice for extra vitamin C. The excessive vitamin and mineral levels gave me pause, but Christine Gerbstadt, M.D., a spokeswoman in Sarasota, Florida, for the American Dietetic Association, says, “It’s safe to take twice the RDA plus a multivitamin. The RDAs are meant to cover a wide range, and if you have normal kidneys and no unusual diseases, there’s no downside.”

Lindberg also says Americans don’t get enough cardio-friendly omega-3 fatty acids. She recommends large doses of high-grade omega-3 fish oil capsules. Based on my weight, I’d have to take six a day, each containing 500 milligrams (combined) of the two specific fatty acids EPA and DHA. But her prescription levels are controversial, as fish oil acts as a blood thinner. “I do not recommend megadosing with fish oil,” Dr. Gerbstadt says. “You increase the risk of bleeding, especially when you take it in combination with things like blood-thinning medication, aspirin, vitamin E or ginkgo. When you disrupt the clotting cascade in your body, you can bleed, internally or externally. If you bump your head or fall down and start bleeding, you can have a serious problem on your hands.” I decided to take the risk, but before you ingest that much fish oil, be sure to check with your doctor.

A ThighMaster for the vagina
Laura Berman, Ph.D., director of the Berman Center, a women’s sexual-health clinic in Chicago, also weighed in and was cautious about wholeheartedly embracing fish oil as a sex enhancer. “Everyone’s looking for a magic bullet,” she says. “Certainly, omega-3 is good for cardiac and brain health. Omega-3 has been linked to dopamine production. If science can prove that omega-3 directly boosts libido and sexual response, that will be very promising. But the research hasn’t been done yet.”

Lindberg readily admits that no scientific data on libido, sexual function and omega-3s exists. She is trying to get funds to do clinical trials. In the meantime, she’s collecting feedback from hundreds of women who have tried her plan, all to great success. “There’s no incentive for a pharmacological company to fund research,” she says. “No one stands to make money on this plan.” Indeed, you can already get all of the supplements Lindberg recommends at your local drugstore.

Of course, no diet is complete without exercise. Lindberg suggests a workout for your vaginal muscles, which you might have ignored at the gym. “Kegels are not enough,” she insists. “To get the necessary tone for vaginal-orgasm ability, try a resistance device. I’ve met many women who thought they had great tone — until they tried one.” Lindberg prefers the GyneFlex, a 3-inch-long, 2-inch-wide plastic V that looks like a ThighMaster for your vagina. (Check it out at GyneFlex.com.) One inserts the gizmo and engages the PC muscles to try to make the two ends of the V click together. I was supposed to put in 15 minutes of “clicking” with my GyneFlex two times a week. If it would help, I was down (there) with that.

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