You like the effect of healthy diet on your skin but because of your fast metabolism you keep getting skinnier and skinnier. Then this email I got from a customer could have come from you.
Hello Seppo, I want to gain a little weight since I’m a bit too skinny.. At around 5′8 I’m 140lbs. and I want to add some weight but don’t know what foods to introduce to my diet. Although green smoothies are good I don’t think they pack enough calories especially for my FAST metabolism. I’m afraid that if I eat more carbs I’ll gain weight but acne and I want to do it as safely as possible. So what new foods that are high in calories can I eat?? Also, before I sleep I eat an apple and 1/2 C of carrot and spinach and 1/4 C of oats. But I find that it doesn’t hold me up for the night and I wake up skinny since I seem to burn alot when I sleep again due to my metabolism. So if you can help me in what to increase or eat that would help and thanks
I see someone has bought on the fairytale of metabolic speed. Don’t worry, you are not the only one. I get this question in one form or other very often.
Let’s start by saying that there’s no such thing as fast or slow metabolism, not in a way most people understand it. Your metabolic speed doesn’t depend on your genes or anything like that. And for those who don’t know, metabolism, or metabolic rate, means how many calories you burn in a given unit of time.
Before we can go on, you have to understand that metabolic rate has two components. Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of calories you spend while in total rest. The second component is your activity level.
Your BMR depends on your body size, weight and age. But a rough estimate is 10 times your weight in pounds. So in your case it would be 1400 calories a day. When people talk of fast or slow metabolism they mean that two people of same size and age would have different basal metabolic rates. There’s just no evidence to support this. Most sport physiology books say that individual differences in BMR, given same body size and age, are less than 5%.
The main determinant of metabolic speed is the second component: activity levels. An active person can easily double their calorie requirement by being active and exercising. So to get an idea of your metabolic speed you need to factor in your activity levels. You can do this either by calculating how many calories you burn exercising, or you can estimate it by multiplying your your BRM; 1.2 X BRM is a good estimate for sedentary people and 1.75 X BRM is good estimate for very active people.
Now to the second part of your email. What foods you should eat?
It’s not about what foods you should eat, but the amount of foods you should eat. To gain weight you need to make sure you eat enough calories. Calorie is a calorie is a calorie no matter which food it comes from.
Your metabolic speed, or total calorie requirements, doesn’t determine the types of foods you should eat. It only determines how much you should eat them. A person eating 4000 calories a day doesn’t need different foods than a person eating 2000 calories a day. He/she just needs to eat more food. I talked about this in a post titled Acne and athelete’s diet.
My recommendation is to eat more fruits. You can easily meet your caloric requirements by eating fruits. It’s not a problem for even very active people. Many active raw fooders eat 4000 calories worth of fruits a day.
Potatoes, rice, quinoa and beans are also acceptable foods. All of which can give you 10′000 calories a day if you want to.
And why would you be afraid to eat more carbs? Because they’ll give you acne?
Refined carbs and other junk food can give you acne, but carbs from whole foods don’t give you acne. And if carbs give you problems more often than not it’s because you eat too much fat.
I get a feeling you are losing some weight while following the recommended diet in Clear for Life?
If so, consider that as a good thing. As your body eliminates toxins it can also eliminate the fat they were stored in. It also starts releasing water it no longer needs (for diluting and eliminating toxins). Both of these lead to loss of weight.
There’s an ‘easy’ solution for that. Hit the gym. Most people are under muscled anyway. And the only reason they don’t look like that is all the fat and water buffing them up. I call these illusionary muscles. Once those illusionary muscles melt away people are faced with a cold reality of how skinny they actually are. I touched this when I wrote about the importance of strength training in curing acne.
In that post I recommended you take a look at Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program. I still recommend you take a look at it. It’s an excellent and quite easy way to add strength training into your fitness routine.
Finally you don’t wake up hungry because of your fast metabolism, it’s because of what you eat in the evening. The things you described hardly add to 200 calories. Assuming you sleep 8 hours you need 466 calories just to meet your BMR requirement.
Not that I recommend you stuff yourself in the evening. I have a feeling you are rather new to eating raw foods. It takes a while to get used to the fact that you need to eat significantly higher volume of food you used to eat. So the overall problem is that you probably eat less than you need to eat. So the solution is to eat more foods. Bananas are great for packing calories, but the non-fruit foods I mentioned above are also acceptable.
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