Why Skinny Guys Stay Skinny – Eating For Bigger Muscles Part 2

pic: Skinny guys can get muscular by eating right and training

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Why Skinny Guys Stay Skinny

This is Part 2 of a series on how to eat right to gain muscle.  Click here for part 1. This article (part 2) has three sections

- one about why skinny guys stay skinny,

- another about how to get yourself to eat more, and

- the real secret to gaining muscle fastest from your diet.

Then next week I’ll share the advanced eating technique to actually gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, plus I’ll include a few sample menus!

The biggest mistake skinny guys make, when starting to lift, is not eating enough.  Oh, they think they are eating enough.  But they aren’t.  They think they are in Case 5 above but really they are in Case 4.

Look at a skinny guy who isn’t lifting. He’s currently skinny, right, so that means he’s not eating excess calories.

Now start him lifting on a decent muscle building program.  Lifting heavy weights burns calories during the activity and also burns more after the activity.  If he’s still eating the same amount as he was before, then he’ll actually lose mass!

This is compounded by the fact that the skinny guy isn’t happy about his muscle size, but he likes being able to see his abs.  (Yeah, but you can see his ribs too!)  So he absolutely doesn’t want to get fat.  He just wants more muscle.  As we’ll see, this constraint comes back to haunt him.

Of course he’ll have heard from his buddies that he needs to eat more.  Plus, he’ll naturally be more hungry.   So chances are he would increase how much he eats, right?

But most skinny guys only end up eating a little bit more.  They eat enough to prevent muscle loss, but not enough to really grow muscles.

An Example Might Help

Let’s take an example of a skinny guy:  6 feet tall, 150 pounds, 10% bodyfat. So he’s not too skinny, he’s got a thin layer of muscle because he’s an active guy, but he’s now going to start lifting.  His target is to get to 180 pounds and stay 10% bodyfat.  (6 feet tall, 180 pounds, and 10% bodyfat looks really good at the beach.)

And let’s say he wants to get there within 1 year.  That’s 30 pounds (27 pounds of muscle and 3 pounds of fat) in 12 months.  Breaking this down, we get to an average of 0.5 pounds of muscle a week.  That’s tough to do but not impossible for the skinny guy who’s never really lifted before.  [And it won’t be linear – in the beginning, if he does things right, he’ll gain faster than he will towards the end.]

It’s pretty universally accepted that a pound of fat stores about 3500 calories.  So to lose 1 pound of fat a week, you’d need to cut about 500 calories a day (and make sure you are lifting so that you lose fat, not muscle).

But what about muscle?  I’ve researched this as best I can and the estimates are all over the board – from 600 calories to 3500 calories per pound of muscle.  And muscle density plays a role too.  A high % of muscle content is water. And it’s not as simple as calories in vs. calories stored as muscle.  How your body processes calories you eat, and converts them to fat or muscle, depends on a ton of factors.  But it’s safe to say that a pound of muscle stores fewer calories than a pound of fat.

The caloric consumption from lifting (or from cardio, though we ignoring cardio for this example) will vary by routine and by person and by intensity but for simplicity let’s assume 500 calories are burned during and after his lifting routine.

Our skinny hero wants to gain muscle so that means he needs to consume his regular calories, plus the 500 he’s burning, plus another couple hundred so that he’s “in excess” and can start to build muscle.  Let’s call it 700 total calories (technically, these are kcal, but I’ll use the common misnomer and just call them calories).

700 or so calories is easy to take in if it’s junk food.  But it’s a lot of food if it’s healthy food.  For example, that would be 3 extra chicken breasts AND 2 extra servings of broccoli!  I repeat, that’s in addition to your regular food throughout the day!

What skinny guys tend to do when they start lifting is they start eating healthier (which means fewer calories per serving of food) and burning more.  So they have to consume far more in quantity than they ever have before.  They feel like they are eating all the time but the two issues of quality and quantity require a lot of food.

For example, the skinny guy might eat more salads, which are not very dense calorically, so he needs to eat a huge serving of it to get in enough calories to replace the McDonald’s cheeseburger he used to eat for lunch.

Then, as you get bigger, you need to eat even more because your body will naturally burn more calories, even at rest.

Keep in mind – this math is not perfect. Nobody responds exactly according to an equation and I’m really simplifying things here.  Generally, I’ve found that skinny guys need to eat even more than the math would indicate if they want to gain muscle.  When you see my sample menus in the 3^rd part of this article, you’ll know what I mean!

If you want a ton more examples, along with even clearer explanations, you should get Tom Venuto’s book, Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.

So the skinny guy eats too few calories, either because he simply can’t eat enough quantity of healthy food, or he is afraid to get fat.

Here’s the Secret For Skinny Guys

Now here’s the secret for skinny guys: The fastest way to gain muscle is to allow yourself to gain a little fat as well.

Gain Muscle Fastest By Adding Muscle And Fat

Note before I start – if you are already fat, then ignore this section. For you, it doesn’t matter if you can gain muscle faster by allowing yourself a little fat gain.  You’re already too fat!  Do NOT lie to yourself that It’s ok to get fatter in the pursuit of more muscle.  If you are a guy, and over 20% bodyfat, then skip this entire article and wait for next week’s article.

But let’s say you are already in decent shape and want more muscle.  As we showed in our skinny guy example, to gain 30 pounds, and stay at the same bodyfat %, he still would need to gain 3 pounds of fat.  As a percentage, that’s staying the same but as an actual amount, that is an increase in total body fat.  If he tried to only gain 30 pounds of muscle without any fat at all, his bodyfat % would actually drop.  BUT – that’s extremely difficult to do.  See part 3 of this series.

If you are willing to gain 1 to 3 % more bodyfat, then you will see the fastest muscle gains!

Let’s assume, for this article, that you are already using a good routine.  I have a routine called Hypertrofreak that is designed for this situation, but the rules I’m sharing today apply no matter what routine you are on, as long as it doesn’t totally stink.

I also want to assume that you are not eating junk all day.  Let’s assume that you are eating a good quality of food – see the 5 Cases from part 1.

To grow, muscles need stimulation, nutrients, and rest.

If you don’t feed the muscle, you can’t expect it to grow (even if your lifting routine is the best possible).

And for your body to grow, it needs an excess of calories.  There are some advanced techniques I’ll share next week about growing muscle while shedding fat at the same time, but let’s look at this simply.

If you don’t have enough calories, (and the right types of calories), then your muscles are competing for those calories. The scientists theorize that the body is hard wired to store fat because our ancestors often went for long periods without food and needed those fat stores for survival.  I obviously don’t know if that’s true or not, but modern studies do show that left to its own inclination, our body won’t send calories to muscles if there aren’t enough calories in general.  We have to manipulate things to make that work.  However, the same can’t be said for fat – our bodies will still store fat even if we are eating less calories than we need overall.

So if we need excess calories to grow muscle, we need to eat more than we burn.

However, that’s a razor’s edge because some of those extra calories may go to fat.

The good news is that you are lifting weights.  As a result, you are helping your muscles fight for those excess calories.

Why not instead eat “just enough” calories to grow muscles without gaining fat? Well, that’s really hard to do.  Most guys who try that end up starving the muscle.  Sure, they prevent fat loss.  But they also prevent muscle growth.  Unless you are extremely precise if your calorie counting (which is hard) and in analyzing how many calories you burn every day (which is even harder), you will probably undershoot calories and thus see limited muscle growth.

How To Start Eating More

Unless you are a true, full-fledged endomorph, your body can actually process a lot more calories than you think; calorie restriction is NOT the solution to dropping fat.  Think of your body as a production machine and you want it to operate as efficiently as possible.  The “raw materials” are your foods and the “product” is your muscles.  For example, say you are 180 pounds now, 10% bodyfat, eating 2800 calories a day and lifting regularly.  You can gradually increase your calories to say, 3500 and actually stay the same weight but drop bodyfat.  You’ll be gaining muscle and losing fat.  I don’t know how it happens, but it does.

Like any goal, it makes sense to pursue in stages.  Here are 5 simple steps to start eating more:

1)       Set a goal.  Determine your target weight, and how many calories it will take to stay there once you get there.

2)       Figure out how many calories you are eating now, and the difference between this and your goal.

3)       This week, increase your calories by 25% of the difference.  Then add another 25% next week.  This will last 4 weeks.

4)       At the end of 4 weeks, reassess.  If you are where you need to be, then stop.

5)       If you weren’t able to stay on track, or you later realized that you miscalculated, repeat the above steps but just for 2 weeks more.

At this point, you should be eating enough calories to be growing to your target size.

But What If I’m Gaining Too Much Fat?

Next week we’re going to uncover the best diet “secret” for gaining muscle mass and losing fat at the same time!  You don’t want to miss that!

Looking to burn fat with weight training? Tired of typical routines?
Get my metabolic routine here: Fat Burn Furnace!

Related posts:

1. How To Eat Right For Bigger Muscles
2. Eating To Gain Muscle Or Lose Fat – It’s Almost The Same
3. How to Harness the Healing Power of Water for Your Muscles

Tags: diet, eating, muscles, skinny guys