The basic message of this book is rather motherly: eat, eat. But according to trainer and former bodybuilding champ Parrillo, it's quite revolutionary advice in the world of bodybuilding, where it's not uncommon for those pumping iron to resort to starvation diets and even diuretics in their quest for ``lean mass.'' Parrillo's more sensible approach centers on adding calories (up to 10,000 a day for men) and eating four to five times a day, with meals structured around a lean protein (chicken or fish) and one or two starch carbohydrates (cauliflower, green beans). Except for its proscription of fruit of any kind, this is not a bad regimen for those who don't spend most of their time in the gym, and the text is quite straightforward and approachable. Still, the book is meant for a very specialized audience. Entire chapters are devoted to the ingestion of esoteric nutritional supplements (dessicated liver tablets, supplemental growth hormone releasers) and ``fascial stretching,'' which Parrillo claims can help weight lifters achieve ``bigger muscles, deeper separations, greater strength.'' There are also pre-competition tips, clearly not intended for the general exercising public: ``If your muscles are hard but your skin is loose, drink slightly less water. If your muscles are soft and lack vascularity, increase your carbohydrates and slightly more water. On the other hand, if you look hard, ripped, and vascular, do not change a thing.'' (Jan.)
Your can increase metabolism through diet and nutrition as well as lifting weights.As you enter your fifth decade, you encounter sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle mass, strength and function. This change -- combined with an inevitable increase in body fat -- invariably slows down your metabolism, the rate at which you burn calories. While lifting weights or engaging in some other form of resistance training best counteracts this, you can also speed up your metabolism’s pace through diet and nutrition.Eat FrequentlyThe U.S. Navy’s “Nutrition and Weight Control Self-Study Guide” stresses for service members of any age to maintain healthy levels of body fat, but cautions that skipping meals, especially breakfast, doesn’t help achieve this. Instead, the Navy suggests eating three, four, five, or even six times a day. While eating fewer than six meals can work for body fat maintenance and weight loss, eating this frequently does the most to boost your metabolism, provided you keep your daily caloric intake the same. You typically burn about 10 percent of the calories in any meal to digest it, so you absorb fewer total calories by increasing the frequency of meals.Don't DietAny diet slows your metabolism somewhat. If you follow a very low-calorie diet, for example, you’ll burn up to 20 percent fewer calories while at rest. Len Kravitz, Ph.D., program coordinator of exercise science and researcher at the University of New Mexico, attributes this to our cavemen days. Since cavemen frequently went days without food, their bodies learned to burn fewer calories in times of famine, which is how your body reacts to a very low-calorie diet. But according to John Parrillo, author of “High-Performance Bodybuilding,” your body can learn to burn more calories, as well. Some of Parrillo's bodybuilding clients, in fact, consume up to 10,000 calories a day without adding body fat. (See References 5, Page 16) Mike Grant, a 50-something, nationally known bodybuilder, gym owner and Parrillo disciple suggests to his clients of all ages -- even the 96-year-old -- to eat every two or three hours during the day to increase metabolic rate.Replace Fat and Carbohydrates with ProteinYou can ensure that you burn more than the typical 10 percent of calories usually used in the consuming, digesting and processing of food -- known as the thermic effect -- by altering the ratio of the nutrients you consume. Since your body uses up to 15 times the energy to digest protein as it does to digest fat and up to five times the energy to digest carbohydrates, a calorie-for-calorie substitution of the first for the other two creates an energy deficit. While any protein source accomplishes this, University of Tennessee research suggests that dairy products -- because of their high levels of metabolism-boosting calcium -- work particularly well. Dieters who ate four servings of dairy a day in the UT study lost as much weight as those who ate two servings a day even though the four-servings-a-day group consumed 100 to 150 more calories every day for 48 weeks.Drink Coffee and TeaA 2011 review in “Obesity Reviews” found little evidence to support the use of many fat-burning and metabolism-increasing supplements like carnitine, conjugated linoleic acid, forskolin, chromium, kelp and fucoxanthin, but did declare that the studies examined showed caffeine and green tea “accelerated fat metabolism.” A 2009 "European Journal of Clinical Nutrition" study found as little as 50 milligrams of caffeine -- the amount usually found in a half cup of coffee or a full cup of tea -- increased metabolism by 6 percent for four hours. Most adults can safely consume up to 4 cups of coffee or 8 cups of tea daily, so either consumed throughout the day significantly increases metabolic activity without ill effects.
