To Perfect Body

The Best Exercises To Develop A Lean Stomach

  If you believed the ads for protein supplements, there would be no way to build muscle and increase healthy body weight on a raw food diet. Bodybuilding magazines usually recommend one to two grams of protein per pound of body weight. It is my own opinion that they’ve advocated such a high protein intake, first, to sell protein supplements, and second, due to the clogging of the cellular basement membrane, which actually creates a protein deficiency. Now, this may be the actual reason some people need that much protein in order to build muscle. But that is not the case with a raw foodist.

  Why? Well, according to my own experience and the researchers at the Max Planck Institute, raw protein has double the strength of cooked protein. That means that as a raw food eater, you require half the protein that a cooked food eater needs to build muscle.
So, how much protein do you really need? I addressed this question back in 1999 while finishing up my book How Long Do You Choose to Live? In chapter 12, “Exercise,” I wrote, “Remember proteins are built from amino acids and your ability to assimilate them is increased with exercise. You only need to increase the exercise, not the amount of protein.”

  In Pumped: Straight Facts for Athletes About Drugs, Supplements, and Training by C. Kuhn, Ph.D., S. Swartzwelder, Ph.D., and W. Wilson, Ph.D., they conclude, “Even heavily training athletes can easily consume enough protein in the average American diet. Men need between 50 and 60 grams of protein daily, depending on their age, and women need between 40 and 50 grams…If an athlete is eating a normal diet, there is no strong evidence right now that taking these bizarre products provides a benefit in terms of muscle deposition or athletic performance.”

  These authors also bring up the use of supplemental creatine, which many athletes use to increase muscular size. They state, “Training normally increases the enzymes that make creatine phosphate: training alone can increase creatine stores by as much as 30%, a change comparable to that claimed by dietary supplements.”
The old-time strongman and wrestler George Hackenschmidt, the Russian Lion, stated in his book The Way to Live, “Man is born without frying pan or stewpot. The purest natural food for humans would therefore be fresh, uncooked food and nuts.” I certainly agree. That’s why I include so many raw, organic nuts and seeds in my diet. I load my salads with high-protein sunflower seed sprouts and alfalfa sprouts, both high-nitro.
If you drive through farm country, the deepest, richest green fields are alfalfa. Farmers know that because alfalfa is incredibly rich in nutrition, they have to feed it sparingly to cattle and horses. But once again, consider how strong and muscular these animals get on grass alone.

  Quinoa is another good protein source, but I get mine from the wild. If you’ve ever seen pigweed or lamb’s quarter, then you’ve seen North American quinoa. In the fall, you can harvest handfuls of these protein-rich seeds into a can or bucket. Then just sprinkle them on your special raw dish. In my newest book, Alive and Well with Wild Foods: A Raw Food Survival Guide, I’ll teach you how to easily find all sorts of muscle-building foods in the wild.

  Remember, building muscle is as much a matter of nitrogen and minerals found in green leafy plants as of protein stores. You will need more calories and more grams of protein than someone who doesn’t work out, but half the protein intake of the cooked food eater.

  In order to build muscle, you must bring oxygen to the cells. In order for muscular contraction to take place, the electrical potential of the nerve and muscle fibers must be high and in place. Well, you might ask, “How do you do that?” With organic calcium. Almost every person living in an industrialized nation is deficient in this mineral. Why? Because drugs, soft drinks, caffeine, and other Western luxuries rob and block calcium absorption. Here’s something to consider: even if a food is known to be high in minerals such as calcium, if it is a poor-quality food, you’ll only absorb around 10%. If the food source is a high-quality organic food, the absorption rate will be around 80%.

  Here’s the reason: calcium supports your liver function so that gastric juices can be produced as well as enzymes. Your entire digestive system will not absorb the vital elements if the food you eat is of poor quality, as is the case with most food produced worldwide.

  Now, you’re probably wondering, “What’s the difference between two carrots, one from your garden, one from the supermarket?” Yes, they look identical—maybe the store-bought carrot even looks more uniform. But all that changes once you take a bite. One tastes sweet and the other bitter. Organically grown produce will always taste sweeter. To what do we attribute the sweetness? As odd as it might sound, it’s the calcium the plant picks up from the soil. This is measured by the plant’s Brix reading—the natural plant sugars the plant contains. The higher the plant sugar, the higher the energy release. Indigestion is simply the failure of a food to release its energy; this is why many cannot digest raw foods. These foods simply lack enough calcium to release the plant sugars as energy.

  Did you know that pigweed or lamb’s quarter is one of the richest sources of calcium you can find? And it’s free for the picking. It’s so strong that Monsanto’s poison “Roundup” weed killer can’t kill it. Here’s another interesting fact: the early settlers were told by the native people to let pigweed grow in their corn patch. Not only did it hold the corn up during windstorms, but it actually made the corn taste sweeter.

  So, the veggies you consume raw with a high Brix reading will grow muscle faster than anyone eating the S.A.D. diet—the standard American diet. Yes, you can build muscle on a raw food diet if you go about it in an intelligent fashion.

Growth Hormone and the Importance of Sleep

 Medical science has discovered that growth hormone can help increase muscle mass. This finding included people who didn’t exercise and whose muscles were atrophied. So, human growth hormone was administered to the frail and elderly who were rapidly losing muscle mass. This muscle wasting condition accelerates if one is bedridden; you can age decades in only weeks if confined to a bed with an injury. However, if you take human growth hormone, it can prevent nitrogen loss, allowing you to maintain your muscles even if you’re unable to work out.

Growth Hormone and the Importance of Sleep

  In order to maintain and gain muscle mass, you must first replace muscle cells faster than you lose them. The word “anabolic” means your body is in a muscle-building mode, as oppsed to “catabolic,” where you are losing muscle. The anabolic condition requires that you properly assimilate the amino acids you obtain from your food. If you do not, you will lose nitrogen, which is essential for the production of protein. Please keep in mind that stress hormones speed up the loss of nitrogen.

Stress hormones or corticosteroids increase your blood sugar, thus revving up your engine for a fight-or-flight reaction. Once you’re in that wired state, forget about gaining muscle. For anabolic growth, you need peace of mind, rest, and sleep. Can you remember how hard it was for you to get out of bed in the morning as a teenager? That was because of human growth hormone. Human growth hormone increases the size of your muscles, strengthens bones, and heightens your sexual potency.

  When your brain is in a delta wave state, you'll have strong spikes of growth hormone release. Thus the need for sleep. You know how good you feel after a deep dreamless sleep? That’s because of the delta brain wave frequencies. Did you ever find it curious that older people get less sleep? Unlike teenagers, whom you have to drag out of bed in the morning, the oldster is already up at the crack of dawn.

  That’s because by age 60, most people produce very little human growth hormone. Growth hormone is said to drop by 14% for each decade of adult life. Not only is growth hormone destroyed by stress, but stress causes the brain to oversecrete brain-destroying cortisol. Cortisol reduces the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which is essential for you to feel happy. When your pleasure pathways are blocked for a long period, a common condition called anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure, is established within the body. The happiness chemicals of youth have been burned up by life’s stressors, leaving in their wake a grouchy old impotent senior or old bitchy witch. Yet look at the marvelous transformations that take place once you start exercising. What causes it? It has been discovered that vigorous exercise stimulates the production of growth hormone.

  Exercise also increases the amount of oxygen and glucose the brain receives. It clears away mental cobwebs and necrotic debris (dead brain cells). Exercise increases the pleasure chemicals called endorphins and decreases high-density lipoproteins which clog brain circulation. Exercise also decreases the stress hormone, cortisol. By doing so, it erases depression and lowers blood sugar levels that predispose older people to diabetes.

  The brain requires blood sugar in the hippocampus to lay down memory, but stress inhibits that function. This is why exercise is so important as a stress reliever. Bear in mind that stress releases cortisol, which interferes with your neurotransmitters. That causes the loss of concentration and memory so common among the elderly. The bottom line is that cortisol kills your brain cells, allowing harmful fats to accumulate and literally causing your brain to rot! Do you think a good exercise program might be a good idea?
Exercise relieves stress. When you don’t exercise on a regular basis, stress chemicals like cortisol release a brain chemical called neuropeptide Y, which gives you an insatiable appetite for carbohydrates that makes you FAT! Stress is why people eat too many sweets and starchy foods. Stress makes it almost impossible to adopt a raw food diet.

  I also want to mention again that intense exercise can deplete choline levels, which are vital for proper brain function. If your brain doesn’t get enough phosphatidylcholine, it will literally cannibalize its own brain cells to get it. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, oats are rich in choline. Choline is derived from lecithin, which keeps cholesterol soluble and flowing. Lecithin helps your body to digest and transport fats by increasing the gallbladder’s ability to make bile.

  The choline that is derived from lecithin is presently used to help people with Alzheimer’s disease. It prevents brain deterioration. This is another reason to have a chlorophyll-rich “green drink” every day. You'll probably get a minimum of 2000 mg of lecithin in this drink. You'll find lecithin not only in the brain and nerve fibers, but also in semen, bile, and breast milk. However, if phosphorus is in short supply, lecithin cannot be produced in the body. Thus, feeblemindedness, memory loss, lack of nerve vitality, neural degeneration, and impotence ensue. Lecithin is primarily made up of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. However, calcium, sulfur, and phosphorus play important roles as well; without phosphorus, lecithin is handicapped and powerless.
You’re probably wondering, “Where can I obtain this extremely valuable mineral?” Again, try raw organic oat groats! They’re our main source of choline, and it comes with its own supply of phosphorus. Almonds are also excellent sources of phosphorus. Once again, I’ll mention my favorite nut snacks, available from Raw Organic Live Nuts—I urge you to try some of the great almond combos.

  Another potent source of phosphorus are sea veggies like kelp and dulse. One of my most delicious meals is a combination of sea veggies, soaked nuts and seeds, warm water, and organic extra virgin olive oil. Olives are also on the list of the highest-phosphorus foods, as are seeds and nuts. Phosphorus-rich foods trigger muscle growth.

  Do you remember the celery stuffed with almond butter? Next time you try it, realize that you’re nourishing your brain, allowing it to overcome the crippling effects of muscle-eating cortisol, and preparing your body to keep producing human growth hormone.

  Growth hormone is released in bursts, targeted directly to your muscles and bones. This infusion of hormone triggers growth. Here’s how it works: growth hormone causes the liver to produce somatomedin, or insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF). It travels to the muscles, where muscular growth is stimulated. What is left over after the first hour is then neutralized by the liver and flushed through the gall bladder. The gall bladder’s bile (think choline, lecithin, and phosphorus) flushes the residue so it can be eliminated from your body. Remember, your body has no lymphatic pump to move the waste that enters the lymph, so you must exercise to get this waste into the bloodstream for elimination.

  While you can eat certain foods for more effective growth hormone production, you can’t demand results. The greatest releases of this muscle-building hormone come during intense exercise and a half-hour to an hour after falling asleep. If you’re really committed to packing on the muscle, you’ll want to take a half-hour to one-hour nap after your workout. This will match the natural growth hormone release cycle with your muscles being more receptive and hungry for growth hormone.

  I’ve found it quite effective to use a brain entrainment unit set on a delta brain wave track and a fifteen minute to half-hour subliminal program especially designed for muscle growth and maintaining youthfulness. I do this before my workouts for fifteen munutes, thus soaking my muscle fibers with growth hormone, making it instantly available for my body during my workout. Since my workouts are usually quite intense, that triggers an additional burst of growth hormone.
It is also good to take the amino acids arginine, ornithine, and alpha-ketoglutarate one hour before you work out and before you go to sleep. Arginine is so effective in releasing growth hormone that it has been used successfully to improve pituitary function in the brains of undersized children. At the University of Turin, arginine was administered to adults 66 to 82 years old to stimulate the production of human growth hormone and combat muscle loss.

  Ornithine has also been given to patients after surgery to prevent muscle loss. When you hear alpha-ketoglutarate, think of the amino acid glutamine. Combined with ornithine, it has been proven to increase the production of human growth hormone much more than any of the other amino acids separately.
If you choose to supplement your training program with these amino acids, do it in a cycle not more than 12 weeks on and 6 weeks off. Of course, if you are not working out on a particular day, no aminos should be taken. Bear in mind that you must also have lots of vitamin C for these to be effective.

  Once again, this brings us back to potassium. When the serum potassium levels in your body go down, this deficiency triggers your brain to reduce levels of growth hormone and insulin growth factor 1 or IGF. The reason I’m nuts about nuts is that the lecithin, choline, and acetylcholine they contain stall the production of somatostatin, which halts the release of growth hormone.

  Some of my favorite veggies are some of the highest-potassium foods, like beets, broccoli, kale, olives, parsley, raisins, spinach, and sunflower seed sprouts (which I pile on my salad by the handful), not to mention almonds and walnuts. I also pour on the sesame seeds and oil in many of my recipes. Additionally, I include plenty of Raw Fermented Organic Veggies, It's the secret of youthfulness of many of the worlds longest living people.

  For a potassium-rich salad dressing, you can’t get better than raw apple cider vinegar and extra virgin olive oil. I might sound like a broken record mentioning my almost daily portion of dulse, kelp, sea lettuce, karango, etc.—all on the list of the highest-potassium foods. Bear in mind that the strongest men in the world have the highest concentration of potassium in their muscles. (As a side note, you’ll never go bald with potassium in your system.)

  By now you’re beginning to see the valuable connection these foods have to preserving and promoting growth hormone levels and maintaining a healthy, fit, and muscular body far beyond what some consider old age.

  You’re probably wondering where you can get the amino acids I mentioned. You’ll find arginine in all berries. This is why I include blackberries, cranberries, blueberries, and the renowned Himalayan goji berry in my raw oat breakfast, which is loaded with nuts and seeds (also on the list of foods with high arginine levels). Don’t forget raw apple cider; drinking a large glass before and after your workouts will boost arginine and trigger the release of human growth hormone.

  Remember, glutamine increases glutathione levels. This is important in preventing memory loss and the deterioration of brainpower. Of course, as you’ve just seen, it triggers the release of human growth hormone. It’s richly supplied in my favorites: oats, parsley, and spinach (which I grow right through the winter in cold frames).

  By juicing spinach and parsley, you will create a powerful cocktail to replenish lost glutamine from exercise. This is important because glutamine prevents muscle deterioration by catabolism and glutamine levels are directly related to how your muscles synthesize protein. After intense exercise, large amounts of glutamine are released from your muscles; up to 50% of the amino acids excreted from the body are glutamine.
Leucine is another amino acid that triggers the release of human growth hormone. It is burned in large amounts during long workout sessions. The good news is that, if supplied abundantly, it will spare other muscle-dependent amino acids from being used up. One of the problems an unhealthy athlete experiences is that both these amino acids generate increased levels of ammonia to be discarded by catabolism. Again, to supply leucine, eat nuts and seeds, apples, and tomatoes.

  To gain and keep muscle, you need human growth hormone, but also insulin growth factor. Without it, not even your hair will grow. Take starving African children; their human growth hormone levels are surprisingly high, but their IGF levels are so low that no muscle growth takes place. This is what I’ve seen in the raw food community and lots of vegetarians, especially vegans. As a raw food advocate, I’m certainly not bashing the countless health benefits of these diets, but let’s face it—the concentration camp look, even if it is in vogue, is not at all healthy! That’s why I’ve written this book. Muscle is a healthy alternative to skin and bones.

  If you fast for five days, your IGF will drop by 66%. That’s when you get into a negative nitrogen balance. A negative nitrogen balance means your body is in a catabolic state and you’re eating up your own muscles to supply protein. If you work out intensely, you may not want to hear this, but you’ll require a lot more protein in your diet in order to remain in a positive nitrogen balance. Your insulin growth factor level is in direct proportion to your protein intake. On an average diet, forget about your anabolic drive—you’re doomed to be weak and skinny (or worse, weak, fat, and diabetic!).

  I am aware of the high fat content of nuts and seeds, but remember that all harmful cholesterol comes from animal products. Still, the abundance of oils found in nuts requires that you burn that fat for energy. This means not missing workouts. If you want a high-protein food without the oils, then add sprouted peas and beans combined with raw organic wheat germ. These are the best protein sources that contain more that 20% protein and are also under 20% fat.

  Beans combined with grains form complete proteins. So, combine raw soaked oats with sprouted beans or corn and peas and you’ll get the very best carbohydrates with under 5% fat and a super high energy content of over 70% complex carbs.

  Now, I hear many people object to all that sugar from grains. That’s what fiber is all about, and that’s also why you go to the gym. There is no more wonderful fiber than what you get from raw oats and fruit and vegetable pectins like the ones in apples and carrots. A high daily intake of dietary fiber is said to stabilize glucose levels so that pre-diabetics never resort to insulin injections and other diabetics are able to get off insulin altogether.