Fitness

Aside from having a metabolism test taken, there are a number of little tricks by which you can determine a person’s rate of energy production. One is to notice how quickly he moves or thinks or how warm he keeps his house. A neighbor once gave me quite a serious lecture on the possibility of my children dying of pneumonia because our house was so cold and they often went outside without coats or sweaters. I silently turned up the furnace, later sold her on nutrition, and now she is comfortable in our house. All energy is turned into heat; if you have no energy, you can have no heat. The energy production of a healthy child is usually much more efficient than that of an adult. In fact, the BMR of a mother can be guessed quite accurately by how much she bundles up her children; such a mother then feels happy, but the children usually feel miserable. Anyone who pays fuel bills will agree that low energy production is quite expensive.

If you are comfortable at a room temperature of 70°F., love a cold shower, need only moderate covering on your bed, and enjoy a pleasant breeze which some people call a “draft,” your metabolism is quite normal. One woman told me she slept with an electric pad at her feet under an electric blanket covered by two more blankets and still was cold. A man said the only time he felt warm was when he got into his car which had stood all day in the hot sunshine with the windows closed. After following an adequate nutrition program, these people, and dozens with milder symptoms of inadequate energy production, soon became comfortable at moderate temperatures. A physician tells me his temperature increases a degree within an hour after drinking a glass of tiger’s milk, showing the rapid and marked increase in energy production. In Dr. Thorne’s experiments at Harvard, the BMR increased within a few minutes after a high-protein breakfast was eaten.

Probably every nutrient plays some role in helping the body to produce energy. The lack may be predominantly one of the B vitamins, iodine, or protein but not necessarily so. Since the trace minerals act as catalysts, or speeder-uppers, of energy production, an undersupply of these minerals may be the major cause. Whatever the cause, if an adequate diet is eaten and well absorbed, energy can be produced in excess of human needs.

A problem which is intimately related to a normal metabolic rate and which often disappears when the nutrition is adequate is that of reducing. I myself was as slow as molasses in discovering this easy solution. A number of obese persons who wanted to reduce when they came to me have been too ill to be put on reducing diets.

“Let’s forget about reducing for at least three months and concentrate on building health,” I would tell them. “Get your basal metabolism built up, and then you can reduce while you sleep. You’ll feel like working and exercising by that time, and reducing will be easier.”

Many of these persons were so malnourished that I recommended 200 to 300 grams of protein daily for them temporarily: large servings of meat, fish, or fowl including liver daily if they enjoyed it; a quart of tiger’s milk made with whole milk; as much yogurt, cheeses, and eggs as they could eat or wanted; a green salad at each lunch and dinner tossed with a tablespoon of cold-pressed soybean oil or approximately two tablespoons of French dressing; two or three tablets of mixed minerals and usually 250 milligrams of vitamin C after each meal; vitamins A and E in capsules daily after breakfast; a capsule of vitamin D every Sunday. I told them to get tablets of digestive enzymes with bile and more tablets of glutamic acid hydrochloride in case gas became a problem. I asked them to forego foods which would fill them up too much or over-stimulate their insulin production, such as potatoes and other starchy vegetables; cereals of all kinds; honey, molasses, any concentrated sweet; desserts except fruits. Certainly refined foods had no place in their health-building regimes: they were to pass up soft drinks, refined sugar concoctions, foods prepared with white flour. They used Sanka instead of coffee unless too exhausted to live without a stimulus.

Some of these people gained weight for a week or two; then they complained they could not eat so much. Their blood sugar was high; they had no craving for sweets. When the diet is adequate, few calories are needed or desired. By the end of three months they had lost weight; some phoned or came in to ask, “How can I stop losing?” One was a seventy-six-year-old woman who had been in a wheelchair for years with arthritis; she had weighed 186 pounds; now she is 40 pounds lighter and walks well with a cane. Another was a man with heart disease, his legs swollen to twice their normal size; now his weight is exactly as he wants it, and all heart symptoms are gone. I shall never forget a middle-aged woman, whose brilliant mind worked sluggish);” and who had huge varicose veins covered with elastic stockings; she had a history of repeated attacks of gout. Three months later I did not recognize this woman: she had been transformed into an alert, slender person with a new vivacious personality and without a visible varicose vein or a tinge of gout. There are many others.

Finally it dawned on me that this method was the way every person should reduce. My advice now is: Throw away your bathroom scales and calorie charts; forget about reducing and forget about exercising, but never forget about building health. When health comes, you cannot keep yourself from exercising; you will work twice as hard without fatigue; you will find yourself wanting to go skiing or dancing or walking or swimming, your own vitality urging you into activity. Weight loss will come slowly perhaps, but if you adhere to the program, it will come. And it will be a permanent loss.

There are many people who want to reduce, but their principal hunger is subconscious. Eating is a substitute for love. The child first experiences love as his mother feeds him, at the same time cooing, singing, and caressing him. The happy old-fashioned mother loved and nursed her baby perhaps 1500 times. Under these circumstances any child soon associates love with food; later, if love is withdrawn, overeating becomes a compensation. People who suffer in this way can usually be helped only by a competent psychiatrist.