Clear for Life

“Help, I’m losing too much weight and my friends comment how skinny I look!”

Please cool down, you are not going to fade away : )

This is one of the most frequently asked questions I get from Clear for Life customers. Perhaps it’s on your mind also, so I wrote a detailed reply to it.

Let’s start with an ABC of body composition and weight control.

Three elements make up for your body weight: water, lean tissue and fat. Water makes up as much as 70% of our total body mass.

Water has many important functions in the body. One is that it’s used to dilute toxins to bring down their concentration to less harmful level.

When the body cannot eliminate all the toxins it has to store them. But it doesn’t store just the toxins, it also stores the water they are diluted in. Solution to pollution is dilution.

Once you stop putting toxins in the organs of elimination have a chance to catch up. The load of toxins in the body starts to go down. As the body gets rid of the toxins it also releases the extra water.

Any rapid weight loss is always water loss.

That’s one part of the weight loss issue.

Second, and this may make you a bit uncomfortable, nearly all of us are under muscled and over fat.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Graham:

“When thin people have a desire to gain weight, they usually fail to recognize that they need to gain muscle, not fat. Almost every client who has even come to me wanting to curtain their weight loss because they thought they were getting too ‘skinny’ actually still needed to lose some fat…

One client, a high-end fashion model, came to me saying she would do whatever I suggested in order to extend her youthful beauty, but she could not afford to lose any more weight. She was long and lanky and looked skinny to be sure, but she was under muscled. When we measured her body fat, she was shocked to discover that it was almost 29% – at least 10% above what I would consider healthy. She did not need to lose weight; she needed to lose fat while gaining muscle.”

Dr. Graham
The 80/10/10 Diet

For most people it only looks like they have muscle because of water and fat. Water inflates their muscles. Within the muscles there’s also lots of fat, and there’s a padding of fat around the muscles.

Once the body starts to release water and fat it looks like our muscles are shrinking. But in reality we have only been stripped off our illusion of muscles. Perhaps for the first time we have to face the fact of how under muscled most of us really are.

Muscle loss happens only in two cases: you don’t use the muscles or you starve yourself. Starving is not an issue, because the body first burns off fat before using muscle for energy. If you purposefully leave yourself calorie-deficient for long periods of time (months) it may happen, but for the vast majority it’s not an issue.

So the only way you can lose muscle is not to use them. Use it or lose it. And as you start using them your muscles gain their size back quickly.

That’s another part to weight loss mystery.

As you can see it doesn’t really make sense to look at your weight and ‘skinniness’ as an indicator of how well you are doing. Rather focus on how you are feeling. Do you still have energy? What about your athletic capabilities, are they still the same/improving/declining?

As long as you feel great and can perform athletically (the way you used to) you have nothing to worry about.

Initially, you may experience a drop in your athletic capabilities. That’s a result of detoxification.

Initially the body may break down more tissue than it can rebuild. So you may lose a little strength. That’s ok. It’s temporary and you will gain the ‘lost’ muscle back.

It doesn’t happen to everybody, but if it happens to you it’s important to be aware of it, and keep an eye on it. This ‘weak’ period should not last for more than a month or two. If it goes on for more than two months, you may have a problem with your diet.

With strength training you can minimize or completely avoid this weak period. I’ve noticed and heard from other people that by training your muscles you can prevent the temporary muscle loss.

On a personal note I can tell that none of this happened to me. Yes, I’ve lost some weight, but I was carrying few extra pound that I was happy to get rid of. Instead of looking skinny I have far more muscle now than I did when I was eating a more standard diet. Putting on muscle has become much easier than it used to be. I get bigger gains from doing less work – you just can’t beat that.

My body builds itself almost automatically. And all I’m doing is to follow the diet guidelines in Clear for Life and the exercise routine I learned from Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.

I never go to the gym anymore. My strength training routine takes only 5 to 10 minutes a day. I only do exercises that I enjoy – I just can’t stand boring and repetitive stuff. And I do it all in my home.

When exercise is so simple and fun there’s no need to look skinny. That’s why I recommend Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.

So to sum things up, ensure that you:

• Do something with your muscles
• Eat sufficient calories
• Keep your fat consumption under 20% of total calories, preferably under 10%
• Eat a pound of greens a day
• Drink enough water; even a slight dehydration can lead to reduced capacity for muscular work

Isn’t it funny how good things just stack up when you do the right things? The same advice that helps you to get clear also gives you a great body. It’s a total transformation from skinny and acne ridden to clear, athletic and sexy. And that really sucks when everyone else is getting fatter and lazier : )

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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Share your views and experiences about acne, getting clear and weight loss at Clear Skin Space forums: “Help, I’m losing too much weight!”

 

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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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

I was listening to an interesting podcast about the effect of strength training on glucose control and insulin resistance. As you probably know maintaining steady blood sugar levels and reversing insulin resistance are crucial for curing acne.

Here’s the link to the podcast. It’s a direct link to the mp3-file.

Fat, Muscle, and the Benefits of Exercise for People With Diabetes

Though this discussion and the research they referred to was done with obese diabetic I think we all can learn something from there.

One of the discussed studies concluded that combined aerobic and resistance training program gives the best results for diabetics.

"Although aerobic exercise is what is typically recommended for treating people with diabetes, this study shows that adding a high-force strength training component has significant advantages," says APTA spokesperson Robin L Marcus, PT, PhD, OCS, assistant professor at the University’s Department of Physical Therapy and the study’s lead researcher.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081031161255.htm

It didn’t take long to find other studies done on a wide variety of individual that support this conclusion.

They also said few interesting things about fat. Among other things they said that fat cells produce this retinol-binding protein that attaches to the insulin receptors. Since there are less insulin receptor sites available for insulin it creates insulin resistance. They also said that fat cells produce inflammatory cells that, when in excess, create both localized and body-wide inflammation.

So there’s a direct link to how carrying too much fat can lead to acne.

What’s even more interesting is that this discussion was not limited to what people normally perceive as extra fat. They talked a lot about the fat around and within muscles. Many of us carry a lot of fat within and around our muscles. It gives an illusion that our muscles are bigger than they actually are, and so we don’t perceive it as an extra fat.

They concluded this in the study quite explicitly. This is a quite from the podcast:

Patients with diabetes are much, much weaker, even though they have large muscles.

This issue comes up with many of my customers when they email me telling about all the muscle they’ve ‘lost’. In most cases it’s just this extra fat and water within and around the muscles that’s melting away (just one of the complications of the healing process).

The main benefit of resistance training was changes in muscle composition. Leans muscle tissue increased whereas the amount of fat in and around the muscle decreased. So the muscles actually turned muscles!

This is the main reason why the soon to be updated version of Clear for Life recommends a combination of aerobic and resistance training.

Brief side note. The researchers said that diabetes really was never meant to be a disease because it was never meant to be a permanent state. Diabetes was meant as a protective mechanism to store energy when food is abundant and thus help us to survive through lean times. Just one more example of how all diseases are protective mechanisms.

Of course strength training has other benefits also. It makes you look better and so improves your self-esteem. It makes you look more attractive (unless you take it over the top). I usually do my strength training in the morning. And I just love how my body feels like steel for the whole day. Nice feeling.

One issue with resistance training is that it can be a hassle. You gotta buy a gym membership and spend time driving to and from the gym. So many people just drop it.

If you enjoy going to the gym, good for you, but if you don’t nobody said you have to do it the hard way.

I do my resistance training in the morning and it usually takes me less than 15 minutes to complete. In many days not even that long. I don’t even touch the weights at gym anymore. They just don’t serve my purpose anymore.

The secret? Bodyweight exercises. You know, pushups and the like. You can get an incredibly effective whole body workout in as little as 10 minutes. Plus using your own body as a gym is much more fun than hauling weights at gym – at least for me. And it teaches your muscles to work together instead of one or few muscles at a time like most gym machines do.

If you are interested of starting or learning more about bodyweight exercises I can’t recommend Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program highly enough.

Lightning Speed Fitness Program simply eliminates time as an excuse. It shows how you can workout your entire body with just two simple exercises. That’s why in many days it only takes me 10 to 15 minutes to do my strength training routine. Lightning Speed Fitness Program also showed me how working out little bit through out the day can be as effective, or even more so, than one longer exercise. Some days I just take five minutes here and there to do my bodyweight exercises. So time is no excuse anymore.

Some days I like to vary my routine and I learned a bunch of other bodyweight exercises from Lightning Speed Fitness Program to do that. Roger also shows how to vary these exercises to make them easier or more challenging. Nice thing is that I also got a bunch of videos where Roger shows how to do these exercises. So it’s easy to get started.

Roger is also a raw food author and educator. He’s one of those guys who really get health and practice what they preach. And he’s a motivating fellow to listen to also.

So I really recommend you get Lightning Speed Fitness Program and check out his other products also.

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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Edgar recently asked me about athlete’s diet that would also help him to cure his acne.

So my question is can you give me an example nutrition plan for me as an athlete. Like what should I be eating for breakfast/lunch/dinner. Or like what type of meat I should eat or foods that will give me enough energy as an athlete while still helping my health, building muscle, and avoiding triggering my acne. I mean like foods that give me energy and help me recover, but the foods that arent bad for triggering my acne.

I have to go by what I’ve learned from Dr. Graham here. If anyone, he should know the subject. Lifetime athlete, coach to many Olympic and world-class athletes and at age of 60+ fitter than most people half his age.

Plus what he says makes a heck of a lot sense.

As an athlete you don’t have any special nutritional requirements. You just need to eat more.

Athletes and active people have somewhat higher protein requirements than sedentary people do, but you’ll get the extra protein from the extra calories you eat.

The same healthy low-fat, raw-vegan diet that gets you clear also helps you as an athlete. In a nutshell, get plenty of fruits and greens.

No need to unnecessarily complicate the matter.

Contrary to commonly held wisdom this diet suits also bodybuilders. Because all the bodybuilding magazines and books tout the need for high-protein diet you won’t find too many examples of bodybuilders eating this diet, but Charlie Abel is one.

Though I have to say that a diet in animal protein probably gives better ‘results’ for bodybuilders. That’s because it exposes you to extra growth hormones. So it could get you bigger but that’s really just artificial ballooning. It’s a bit like blowing more air into a balloon.

Gaining size that way does nothing to your athletic performance. It won’t make you any stronger or faster. You just balloon up, and once you stop eating that way you’ll shrink back to more normal size. And in the process you’ll wreck your health and make it more difficult to get over acne.

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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin