Ganar/ganar o no hay trato

Instead of calorie-restricting (HECK NO), the Raw Till 4 lifestyle recommends unlimited calories from carbohydrates. There is no maximum number of calories per day, but I do recommend an absolute minimum of 2100 calories for girls based on the World Health Organisation recommendations. Anything under that is considered semi-starvation and of course I am not going to endorse that.

Some girls who come to the lifestyle don’t like the idea of an objective minimum calorie target. Instead, they want to “listen to their bodies” or eat “intuitively.” What “listening to your body” really means is “listening to your feelings,” and feelings are just body-signals. They let you know when something is working well, or not working well, or when something from your environment is good for you or bad for you. Ideally we should be able to listen to our body-signals and do just fine, but in reality there’s a big problem with that: if you’re not healthy, and haven’t been healthy long-term, your body’s signals aren’t going to be healthy either! If you’re accustomed to calorie-restricting, or to eating fatty foods that are calorie-dense, your body-signals will respond from that state. They’re not going to help you become healthier; they’re going to help you stay where you are, because that’s the state they’re accustomed to.

The simplest example of mixed-up body signals are the signals for stomach capacity. Low stomach capacity is common in beginners to the RT4 lifestyle, due to years (or an entire lifetime) of consuming foods that have low volume but high caloric density (like foods with lots of oil or animal products). When switching to a high carb diet, they start eating foods that have high volume but low caloric density (especially fruits and veggies). This means that many girls have trouble consuming enough carb calories in the beginning because their stomach signals are accustomed to such small volumes they get full on very small meals of fruit because they’re used to small meals but the calories in the fruit meal might be 1/2 or even 1/4 of the calories in the low volume meals they’re used to eating. This leads them to under eat on high carb foods if they just listen to their body.

This is a stage we must work through by increasing the amount our stomach can handle in one sitting so that we can get enough calories from fruit or starches in each meal. Over time it will feel natural and easy to consume 800+ fruit calories in one sitting, because that really is our natural way (our stomachs are designed to expand for that kind of eating), but in the beginning it won’t feel natural for everyone. I also hear girls make statements like: “my body was telling me I needed more fat” or “my body needed animal products.” Those kinds of statements are just inexperienced and uneducated. Usually girls are just under-carbed and starving, so their bodies start searching for the quickest, easiest source of high-density calories. When they eat some fatty, junky food, they feel satiated, so they convince themselves that listening to their body was the right answer. But really, all they needed was to eat more calories from fruit or cooked starches and they would’ve been fine. The term “listening to my body” has become a kind of go-to excuse when girls aren’t eating enough of the right foods and take the easy way out. Or they are impatient and want quick weight loss results.

Dr. Douglas Lisle talks about the problems with our body-signals in his book The Pleasure Trap. Your body signals essentially help you do three things: seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. That’s what your feelings are telling you. They’re not telling you how to be optimally healthy, lean and fit. It’s not your feelings that are going to guide you to health: it’s your mind.

Your feelings will direct you to the most calorically-dense stimulating food, for short-term satisfaction. Your feelings want you to get the most instant pleasure, with the least energy spent and the least pain. So in our society, they’ll lead you towards super-rich, fatty foods, probably loaded with animal products, because those give you the quickest satisfaction; or if you’re vegan, you’ll end up going for high fat, “gourmet” vegan foods. In our world it’s much easier to go through the drive-in and get a greasy burger than to cook a healthy rice dish for dinner, but going for the easy, greasy food is what I call: “eat now, pay later.” Sure, you get immediate satisfaction, but you’ll pay in the long run with fat gain, dis-ease and depression.

It’s your intelligence that will direct you to the foods that are actually good for you, in the right volume, and it’s your intelligence that will help you stay on the lifestyle long term, because you’ll know it works, even while you’re body is still adapting to it. That’s why it’s so important to read and learn about health. It’s also why I set objective targets for our health.

The other kind of “listening to your body” is generally popular with spiritual girls who mistake lack of energy with calmness and contentment or spiritual-bliss. In actuality, their mind’s are spaced-out from being under-carbed and their bodies have dampened their hunger signals and metabolism so they feel a kind of physical deprivation. They listen to their body and under eat, and this starves their body and mind of

energy. They end up thinking of being spacey as a “spiritual” state, but mental clarity and physical energy come from being carbed up, not from starving the body and mind. Eating enough to be physically healthy and setting objective goals based on an understanding of how the human body works isn’t non-spiritual or somehow not natural, and being physically fit isn’t in opposition to being spiritual. In fact, the most spiritual girls I know are carbed up fruit bats who are full of life and happiness; they’re energetic and radiate happiness, compassion and love. When we’re coming from an unhealthy background, and living in the real world, listening to our bodies without objective goals isn’t the road to health. We don’t just “listen to our car” to know when it needs more fuel or an oil change or new tires; we read gauges that give us objective data. That way we don’t need to wait for it to run out of gas before we know to fill it up, or wait for something to seize before changing the oil, or wait for a flat before changing the tires. Why would we just listen to our bodies when we also have objective ways to gauge when we need more fuel, or certain vitamins, or more fiber, or more water, etc.? Hmmm.