Eat Like This To Gain Muscle And Lose Fat At The Same Time – conclusion

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The Two Keys For Eating To Gain Muscle While Simultaneously Shedding Fat

I’ve found two specific eating habits that are essential if you want to gain muscle and shed fat at the same time.

This is the 3^rd and final installment on this mini-series of how to eat to maximize muscle gain.  Click here for part 1 and here for part 2.  Plus, today I’m including some sample menus!

Before I share them, and conclude this series, let’s get some assumptions on the table:

• You are not fat now, but still want to get leaner
• You want to gain muscle AND lose fat at the same time
• You are willing to have each of those goals progress more slowly in combination than if you focused on only one at a time; but you still want good progress on both
• I assume you are using a decent lifting routine
• I assume you are eating healthy food, in a good mix of proteins, carbs, and fats; if you don’t know the basics, then refer to Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle or 3 Months To A New You.

Ok , so rather than tease you, I’ll state the two keys upfront:

a)       Gradually increase your overall calories to a point far above what you think you should be eating

b)       Use the zig-zag calorie method

Last week I shared a 5-step strategy about how to gradually increase your caloric intake.

Now let’s talk about that “zig-zag method”… (more…)

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Continue reading about Eat Like This To Gain Muscle And Lose Fat At The Same Time – conclusion

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

[Don't forget - I give away a free lifting routine ebook to the top contributor each month to our free discussion forum!]

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 (more…)

Continue reading about Why Skinny Guys Stay Skinny – Eating For Bigger Muscles Part 2

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I’m starting a series today on how you should eat in order to gain more muscle mass.  This will be a 3-parter that I’ll finish throughout the month.  Here’s the outline:

1. Why your eating habits are more important than your lifting habits if you want to get bigger (naturally)
2. Why skinny guys stay skinny – plus, the fastest way to gain muscle from your diet
3. How to eat more to gain more muscle and actually lose fat at the same time – plus, I’ll also include some sample menus ( keep in mind that entire books are written on menus so I’m only offering some examples!)

Today let’s tackle the importance of eating habits compared to lifting habits.  Next week we’ll dive into #2 and the week after that we’ll conclude with the third topic.

Why Eating Is More Important Than Lifting

You want to get bigger, huh?  Join the crowd.

You might just be thinking “a little” bigger.  Or maybe you are thinking “a lot bigger”.  And maybe you just want bigger shoulders, or pecs, or glutes, or whatever.

The point is, we’re talking physique here and we all have different ideal images of what our target physique should be.  If you are reading this, then chances are high that part of your desired physique means bigger muscles.

So weightlifting is the most important part of getting bigger muscles, right?

Wrong.

Now before you start writing me hate mail, I’m saying “most important”.  That’s a relative term.  Meaning, that of course lifting matters!  If you want to get bigger muscles, instead of just a bigger gut, then you’ve gotta lift.

But I’m saying that a great eating plan with a mediocre lifting routine will do more for your physique than a great lifting routine and a mediocre eating plan.

(I’d like to write that previous sentence in all caps, but that would just annoy you, right?)

A Simple Example

Let’s walk through a very simplified analysis of 5 cases…

Muscles need stimulation, nutrients, and rest.  That combination triggers growth.  How much growth depends on the quality and quantity of the stimulation, nutrients, and rest.

No stimulation, no growth.  Ditto for rest.  And of course, no nutrients (food), no growth.

Since this article series is about how eating impacts muscle growth, let’s assume for now that you are on a pretty good lifting routine.  It’s not the best, but it’s not the worst.  (So, you can extrapolate from this and assume that results will be better/worse in relation to your lifting routine.)

Case 1: Let’s say you are doing your “adequate” lifting routine, but not eating at all.  What would happen?  Your body would go into starvation mode, burning muscle first, then fat, and then you’d die.  Obviously, no muscle growth in this scenario.

Case 2: Now, instead of eating nothing, imagine you eat a small quantity of junk food.  Let’s assume total calories are just enough to prevent starvation.  But your muscles need protein (in the form of amino acids) to heal after you’ve stimulated them with your adequate workout.  And so just junk food doesn’t give the muscles what they need to grow.  Result:  no muscle growth.

Case 3: (more…)

Continue reading about How To Eat Right For Bigger Muscles

There are many articles on this site dealing with food – some of our most popular deal with junk food here and here.

Others deal with protein.

And of course, we recently dealt with eating for muscle gain vs eating for fat loss.

But one question that gets asked time after time is what to eat before/after your workouts in order to maximize muscle gain without adding fat.

I’m going to jump right into my recommendations and save the explanations for the end – I’m betting some of you don’t care about the explanations as much as the action plan!

Pre and Post Workout Eating Guidelines

Important preamble:  except for #4, these guidelines apply to all of you, whether you are trying to gain mass, lose fat, or just maintain.  No matter who you are, you should do about the same thing with your eating in the window before/during/after your lifting workouts.  The main difference between gaining and losing overall bodyweight is not different overall eating plans.  The difference comes down to total weekly calories.  More on that here.

1.  Never train on an empty stomach. I’m talking about weight training here (there are mixed reports of doing cardio in (more…)

Continue reading about What To Eat Before And After Your Workout

Sometimes we think we are so clever.

We think we can just fool our bodies into looking the way we want it to. It’s funny what people are willing to try just so that they can lose fat without having to exercise.

This is the lazy way to try to lose weight, and it doesn’t work for very long. Whether you’re trying to lose a lot of fat or just remove that stubborn bit of fat on your gut, you’d better read closely, because the same rules will apply.

Contrary to what you might be thinking, people don’t always become overweight simply because they are overeating – there’s more to the story than that. I remember feeling so surprised when I once talked to an overweight person who told me he never eats breakfast, and then only eats a small salad for lunch.

I remember thinking “Sheesh, I really feel bad for this guy. His genetics must be terribly unfair to him”. But then I started to notice that this was a common theme among many overweight people.

Yes, fat can be gained by overeating huge amounts of food all the time, but it can also be gained by eating less food and slowing your metabolism down. I’ll explain what this means.

It’s Not That Simple

Let me start off by saying that how much fat you have on your body is not simple math. If you keep your energy expenditure constant but you lower your calories, you’ll lose weight. So it seems that if you lowered your calories even more, you would lose even more weight… it’s simple math, right?

Well, actually it’s not simple math. Your body doesn’t know the rules of your little calorie calculations, and frankly, it doesn’t really want to follow them either. Your body worries about survival first, and when you don’t give it enough food, your body does what will help it to survive — it saves what you eat as fat.

This is because humans haven’t always lived in a world where food was so abundant. The human species has had to endure a world where food may or may not come on any given day… or even week for that matter.

If weight loss really were simple math, and people could really burn 10 pounds of fat every week forever, then humans wouldn’t have been able to survive the hunting and gathering days of our past. They would have all starved to death long ago.

Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for us), our bodies are smart enough to adapt to the amounts of food we give them. When we eat less food, our metabolism slows down so that we can survive off of less food.

So let’s take a look at what happens to us when we severely cut our calorie intake to lose fat:

1. Loss of fat, muscle, and water: This is the part of most diets that gets all the attention. You start your diet and you lose a whopping (more…)

Continue reading about Starvation is Not the Answer, Part 1

Ever heard somebody say that you better watch what you eat? Watching what you eat is very important, but you’ll also need to pay attention to what you’re not eating if you want to keep muscle on your body.

I’m sure you’ve already heard that you need to eat plenty of protein to keep your body in good shape and build muscle, so I probably don’t need to repeat that to you.

But if you’re wondering how much protein you should get with each meal, when to eat it, and how to eat it… I might be able to help you out there.

Protein Every 3 Hours

First, let’s talk about the when and the why. Imagine, for a moment, that your body is a factory. This small factory works each day to produce the materials that it needs to keep its own walls and floor in good shape.

Imagine that the bricks in the factory walls are constantly wearing out, so a conveyor belt is needed to bring new materials into the factory. This is pretty similar to what’s going on inside your body as your cells are constantly being replaced. Just as the bricks in the factory wall need to be replaced, your body needs protein to rebuild it’s cells.

Your body is good at storing all those excess calories that you eat as fat cells, but protein isn’t really stored in your body for long periods of time. Protein only stays in your body for about 3 hours.

So, going along with the conveyor belt analogy, if more bricks end up on the conveyor belt than are really needed, they just fall off the end of the conveyor belt and are swept away to another place. They aren’t stored or used to build the walls. If you eat too much protein, it isn’t stored for later. (more…)

Continue reading about Keeping the Protein Flow

Just when you thought we couldn’t climb any higher…

Let’s be honest with ourselves, we’re getting fatter year after year. With every sugar drink and super-sized soda consumed, we hobble yet another step higher up the fat chain. Staying lean and toned from our workouts becomes more and more of a distant dream.

But climbing up the fat chain represents more than the expanding state we are in. The fat chain not only shows us that we occupy the very top of this top-heavy hierarchy, but it also tells us how we arrived there. The fat chain is also a chain of events that leads us to arrive at the state we are in. It’s a repeating cycle, or a chain reaction that only becomes harder to stop with time.

This is because getting fat isn’t something that “happens” to anybody. Nobody rolls out of bed in the morning to suddenly find themselves overweight. Instead, we slowly climb the chain link by link. Whenever it seems that the top of the chain is reached, we add another link and climb a bit higher.

These tiny links accumulate slowly, day by day, over time. We can add these links in so many ways, but we are hardly conscious of the links we add through what we drink. And most people aren’t aware of the triple hit that our system takes when we drink soft drinks. (more…)

Continue reading about Drinking Your Way to the Top of the Fat Chain