To Perfect Body

  If you were going to build a house, you would first need to decide on what the best materials would be. Naturally, the choice of materials would be governed by the anticipated strength of the structure. The size of your structure would require enough materials to be available for the construction.

  Assuming you’ve chosen the best and highest-quality materials to build with (which I’ll list for you as we go along), you’ll have to be aware of a few facts from the start. I hope this doesn’t stop you in your tracks, but here it is. If you want to add one pound of muscle, you are going to have to eat more food. Your calorie intake should be at least 2500 calories more than required to maintain your current weight. (however raw foodist require less calories to maintain weight than a cooked food eater). If you do this, you can gain a pound of muscle in a couple of weeks, providing you work your butt off in the gym. Are you willing to make that commitment, or are you content to be a scarecrow?

  If you’re a 140-pound man, it will take you 9 weeks to gain 5 pounds of muscle if you follow the program in this book. If you are a woman weighing 100 pounds, the same gain in muscle will require 10 weeks. For a 10-pound gain, simply double those figures. For every additional 20 pounds of original weight, deduct half a week. So a man weighing 160 will take 8.5 weeks to gain 5 pounds of muscle, while a 180-pound man requires only 8 weeks.

  Since muscle is built with protein, you will have to increase the number of grams of protein you eat per meal. However, you will only assimilate a small amount per meal; the rest of the excess unassimilated protein will be stored as body fat. This is why it is important to begin eating more small meals per day, perhaps as many as five.

  I personally enjoy high-calorie/high-protein snacks like the nuts I carry on my website, Raw Organic Live Nuts. enzyme-rich organic foods. If I sit down and enjoy a 4-oz. package of their pesto walnuts, that’s an extra 600 calories and 16 grams of protein.
Before workouts, you can eat some dehydrated fruit. As fruits dehydrate, their natural sugars become concentrated. Just a small handful of dried fruits, about ¼ cup, will yield another 120 calories. Now, finish it off with a glass of fresh apple cider and add another 120 calories. Raw organic juices add a very important component in building muscle—potassium.

  Potassium removes waste products that accumulate in your muscle tissue during hard workouts. These include monopotassium phosphate, paralactic acid, and carbon dioxide. The sugar that releases workout energy is glycogen. It must be oxidized and converted to usable power within the muscle. Potassium salts are essential elements in this process. When oxidation is impaired, glycogen is not consumed, other sugars and starches cannot be used by the body, and your muscular activity comes to a halt.

  In order for you to keep your muscles and nerves healthy, you must have a high percentage of potassium in your body. What I especially like about high-potassium foods and drinks is their ability to neutralize acids and toxins; they dramatically increase the alkalinity of your blood and lymph. Potassium literally washes your organs and muscles in a process called saponification, which is the conversion of fat into soap. You wash the built-up workout acids out of your muscles, giving you better muscular gains in less time.

  One of the highest-potassium foods on earth are black olives, especially organic Greek olives. Just two olives will give you around 40 calories and a whopping 250 grams of potassium. In addition to my regular lunch of raw salad, I’ll always consume at least 20 raw, organic black Greek olives—that’s 400 calories. Since I usually get up in the middle of the night to drink extra water, vital for muscle tissue, I will also eat a couple of bananas. This ups my snack calorie count by another 210 calories.

  Every afternoon, my wife and I have quiet time and enjoy a glass of red wine; we do the same before bedtime. Those two glasses of red wine add another 240 calories. However, I may omit the evening glass and opt for one of my favorite drinks, a “Merrie Wabbit.” This is a combo of raw carrot, beet, and tomato juiced in the juicer with horseradish, garlic, cayenne pepper, half a lemon, and half a lime. I add a dash of vodka for my enjoyment (which you may want to leave out). Then I sprinkle dried onion and parsley on top. This drink contains 350 calories, making a total of 1750 extra calories from snacks and drinks. Oh, I almost forgot six small sticks of celery with a tablespoon of raw organic almond butter on each piece—there’s another 780 calories (plus 42 grams of protein), making the snack total 2530 extra calories. This will allow you to gain a pound of muscle every two weeks.

  So, you can see, it’s really not that difficult if you count. And at present, I only eat two meals a day. By adding one extra raw meal, I could gain five pounds of muscle in a little under two months. But, again, I’ve got to count calories and work out constantly. More on that as we go along.

  Remember, muscle is 70% water, 22% protein, and 7% lipids or fat. Here’s where we get back to those phospholipids we talked about earlier. You must train with sufficient intensity to stimulate new muscle growth by drawing amino acids from your bloodstream. Trained muscles do that more easily than untrained muscles.
The reason I find it easier to gain muscle on a raw food diet is that I get plenty of sleep. Your body’s natural growth hormone is released mainly during periods of deep sleep. The delta and theta brain wave rhythms of deep sleep release the vital chemicals the body requires for growth and repair in around two-hour to four-hour cycles.