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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November 19th, 2008 at 6:46 am
If a person (as in me) was in perfect, physical condition, outward appearance, like fitness wise. Would i still need to exercise on a daily basis? And would not doing so keep me from obtaining my acne-free goals? If yes, why? (is there something i am missing, besides fat (LOL)).
Thanks in advance to your considerate and speedy response.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I can’t say that you couldn’t get clear without exercising, but I can say that you can’t be in good health without exercising.
And I have to ask you why wouldn’t you exercise?
It makes life so much better. It makes you happier, improves your self-esteem, makes you look better, and makes sticking to a healthy lifestyle so much easier.
Like I say in Clear for Life all the elements of health work together and reinforce each other. None is more important than the others, and you can’t have great health if you ignore any of them.
Exercising and being active is so much more than just about burning calories and fat. It makes your whole body work much better.
November 19th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Dang, well i guess i gotta exercise now. The reason i havn’t was because, after i started i broke out and was afraid & suspicious that it was because of my exercising? Is this normal?
November 20th, 2008 at 1:59 am
dang, i lost that last blog that i commented on so sorry for repeating myself in advance. Anyway, will olive oil or flax seed oil in any way worsen my acne, if used in place of fatty foods like nuts, olives, or avocados, because i like it on my salads, and it is an extremely easy way to get my oils in for the day. (i only intake 1 1/2 tablespoons daily, therefore ensure my never overdoing it, that isn’t a problem whatsoever).
-Thanks-
November 20th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Oscar,
I doubt that you broke out because of exercising. And if you did, it will be very short-term and the benefits you get from regular exercise will fat outweigh any temporary breakouts.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Kyle,
If you don’t overdo them then I don’t see anything bad in that. Still, I’d eat the whole foods rather than the oils. So eat olives rather than olive oil.
November 20th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
good point, thanks!
November 20th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
Yeah, Thanks!
November 21st, 2008 at 4:03 am
OH, My, Goodness!! why, how, what, makes this so difficult. I think i am going to pass out from exhaustion, if you know what i mean! Ok this site is jam packed with RAW suggestions and all sorts of things that look like incredible facts. PROBLEM? Abso-frigen-lutely!! This site; waisays.com is the same exact diet as you describe (which is what caught my attention in the first place.. with the fruits & raw material, et cetera) except one incy-tincy little detail………… he says that fruit WILL cause your blood level to fluctuate unless you consume at least 50% of your calories from oils!! That’s a 2:1 ratio of sugars (like fruits) to oils (particularly
olive oil, he suggests). OK -deep breath- so if your wondering why i bring this up and get so stressed about simply another acne forum, its because he (Wai) gives such an extraordinary reason; -that fat does not cause acne and how fats constrict blood sugar levels & fluctuations, as well as explaining that only beta-carotines (and of course, other food addictors throw this balance off-; as do you for not eating high amounts of fats -such as throwing your system off, et cetera, for the sake of time and getting my point across i won’t go into detail with the reasoning you wrote, and already know. please take a look at the website and maybe even write a blog on it!!
I would be very greatful for a detailed answer, to clear my confusions!! Thank you very very much!
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 am
Spanks,
You know at one province of Thailand they eat grasshoppers and all sorts of other bugs. I could probably find a website saying that eating all of them is good for you.
Anyway… all I can say that real world experience shows that fruits, in absence of insulin resistance, won’t spike blood sugar levels. In the Candida posts I quoted Steve Pavlina who trialled raw food diet. During his trial he measured his blood sugar levels, and they remained very stable. Even 19 bananas a day didn’t cause them to spike. You can measure your own blood sugar levels to check if you want to.
I can also say that there’s plenty of experience in the raw food circles that high-fat raw food diet leads to disaster. Within the first 6 to 12 months people get better (because they stopped eating garbage) but after that the high fat content starts catching up with them.
So you can choose to listen to those who have gone before, or go through the disaster yourself. Up to you.
Indigestion is another reason not to eat fat after eating fruits. Fruits pass through the stomach very quickly, but if you add fat to the mix they just sit in the stomach until the fat has been digested. This can take hours and the fruit just putrefies there.
Besides taking olive oil after fruits just makes no sense. No animal in nature acts like that. And if my body would want me to eat fat after eating fruits it would tell me so with fat cravings. But I never get them after eating fruits.
November 22nd, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Thanks. =-)