If you are careful about what you eat and have still found yourself gaining weight then finding out what type of metabolism you have could be the answer. Lindsay Jennings investigates.

NO matter how many carbohydrates Tracy Cordell packed her diet with she never felt satisfied for long. Filling bowls of pasta, bread or piles of potatoes with her meal would leave her feeling hungry about an hour or two later.

"I suffered from constant hunger and would feel very faint and lacking in energy and I was having to eat more and more to try and get some energy," she recalls. "I never really struggled with my weight, but I used to think 'this is ridiculous", I can't keep eating this amount."

Tracy, who runs a fitness and nutrition consultancy called Fit For You with her husband Phil, was an athletic 14 dress size when she first put the metabolic typing theory to the test, almost three years ago.

She learned that her body would be best suited to proteins than the hunger-inducing carbohydrates she had relied upon. By switching from pasta and rice to more protein-based dishes, she felt energised and slept better as a result.

"I actually began to wake up feeling refreshed and I dropped to a size ten which was a bonus because I didn't set out to lose weight," she says.

"Before I'd always classed myself as a bit of a chocaholic but I found I didn't crave sugar any more. The key thing was that I knew what worked for my body. If you're eating within the correct food type for you then your body will always find its optimum weight and health."

In simple terms, metabolic typing involves finding out which foods best fuel your body in order for it to run at its best. The metabolism controls the rate at which we burn off our food for energy and can be drastically altered by some of the nutrient-sapping low fat diets and processed foods we're so fond of in the Western world. Research has shown that years of restrictive dieting can actually slow the metabolism down, increasing the likelihood of putting on weight, but Tracy says it is possible to kick-start it again.

"Yo-yo dieting has a very harsh effect on the body and it's a long process to balance it, but it can be done. The body has an amazing ability to rejuvenate itself given the right tools," she explains.

Tracy and Phil, 39, set up Fit For You from their home in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, in 1998 and initially offered personal training before expanding further into nutrition and lifestyle.

"I was fed up with everybody being obsessed with weight. I wanted to take that obsession and gear it more towards health," she says.

Eating the right food for her metabolic type certainly seems to suit Tracy who, although she runs her own business and is mum to three young children aged between two and ten, looks younger than her 34 years and has bags of energy.

To find someone's metabolic type, Tracy and Phil use a questionnaire made up of 65 questions. The queries can seem a little strange - How often do you get goosebumps? Are your ears a darker, redder colour than your complexion? - but taken with questions about how you react to certain foods, they give a wider picture about people's food habits and traits.

From there, they can tell what basic type a person is from three categories - protein, carbohydrate or mixed, the latter requiring a balance of carbohydrates and protein. But the pair recommend a more in-depth analysis which incorporates a review of your entire lifestyle.

"Metabolic typing is a way of establishing what people genetically, psychologically and physically are like and from that you can find what food categories are best for them," says Tracy.

"It's not like a diet, it's classed as a way of eating but the important things it to allow people to come back to their optimum health. It allows the body to gradually rejuvenate itself and get back to how it should be functioning."

A metabolic type can often be traced to hereditary needs. When I fill out the questionnaire I emerge as a mixed type, which means I should be eating a balance of proteins and carbohydrates. It turns out to be the same foods my granny and her granny used to cook - meat and two veg - which fits in with the theory of eating to your hereditary type.

"Western society is such a mixture of different cultures that you don't often know where our genetic culture has come from," says Tracy.

"For example, the Eskimos survive on meat and blubber and there's no history of heart disease or cancer, but if you gave them the diet of the Native American Indians they wouldn't survive very well."

Since the 1930s, scientists and researchers have been fascinated by the ways humans differ from one another on a biochemical and metabolic level. Based on early information, nutritionists discovered that many ailments could be resolved when people changed their diets to coincide with their unique body chemistry.

The benefits of eating to your metabolic type include energy gain, helping to prevent long and short term illnesses, banishing food cravings and alleviating allergies.

Tracy talks of one client in her 60s who ate healthily, including enough fruit every day to open a small market stall, yet she had painful joints and suffered from constipation. After being tested she learned that she was a protein type and that the fruit and pasta she was consuming was actually her body's own enemy. Two weeks after switching to a protein-based diet she noticed the pain in her hip had eased considerably and the constipation had disappeared.

For Tracy, the benefits are about investing in her future. "For me it's like putting into a pension plan," she says. "Most people will prepare for the future financially but I want to prepare for the future physically. I want to be around to see my children and grandchildren grow up."

* To contact Fit For You call 0191-389 0832.