Eating To Gain Muscle Or Lose Fat – It’s Almost The Same

Are you trying to lose fat? Or to gain muscle?

That probably seems like a big question, huh?  In fact, I get questions from readers all the time asking things like “what are the best guidelines for eating when you want to lose fat?” or “I’m trying to add a lot of muscle – how should I eat?”.

It seems that people consider these two goals to require vastly different strategies.

What I might have to say about this may surprise you:

It’s that the two plans are not so different as you might think.

In fact, whether you are trying to shed fat or gain muscle, your eating plan would be nearly identical!

The Similarities

In both cases you want to:

1. eat frequent meals (every 2 to 3 hours or 5 to 8 meals a day)
2. eat natural foods – plants or animals that are in a form close to how they occur naturally; a box of Fruit Loops obviously is as unnatural as Mark McGuire’s homerun record
3. each day you want 30% to 40% of your calories to come from proteins, 30% to 60% to come from carbs, and 15% to 30% to come from fats; more carbs on workout days, less carbs on non-workout days
4. eat protein with every meal
5. eat a veggie or fruit with every meal
6. eat breakfast!
7. eat more carbs around your workouts, less other times of day
8. eat protein around your workouts
9. don’t eat high fats and high simple sugars in the same meal

(more…)

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Continue reading about Eating To Gain Muscle Or Lose Fat – It’s Almost The Same

Well, that headline might be a little sensational.  But they are damn good tasting, can be made in under 5 minutes, and are quite healthy.  Trust me – these are simple to make and I’ve got the recipe and tricks to make them fast (and even pictures to go with the instructions!) at the end of this post.  In contrast to their simplicity, this turned into a long post! Last autumn I was addicted to protein bars.  I loved Protein Plus from Powerbar, and Clif Builders from ClifBar.  But I would go for anything that had a lot of protein and tasted good.  I’d have one before, and one after, every workout (I wasn’t taking protein shakes).  (more…)

Continue reading about World’s Best Tasting, Fastest, Healthiest Homemade Protein Bars

Getting the right amounts of food is a huge part of the muscle-building and fat-loss equation. You can train as hard as you want enough in the gym, but if you don’t get enough food, you’ll never have the fuel needed to become stronger.

On the other hand, if you eat too much, you’ll end up overweight and wondering where your muscle is buried beneath the fat. So the question is: How much food, or how many calories do I need to consume?

The truth:

Counting calories is a great way for you to know that you are eating the correct amount of food. In fact, it is the best way for you to measure your daily calorie intake. But the truth is that most of you are never actually going to weigh your food and do the work necessary for calorie counting to pay off.

We can talk all day about how many calories you should be eating, but it won’t do you any good unless you are actually counting your calories.

Portions:

Since most of you are too lazy to count your calories (just admit, and I will too) I recommend the portion method for most people. This simple method has been around for a long time, and it is the quick and dirty way to know the right amount of food for you. Here’s how to do it:

Six small meals: Each meal should (more…)

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This post is part 2 of a 2 part series. In part 1, Starvation is Not the Answer, we talked about how under eating can slow down your metabolism and make you fatter.

Here’s a piece of information that some of you will be glad to hear – Eating enough food each day will help you to keep fat off of your body. You are going to have to forget the idea that cutting fat comes from just eating less food; it’s simply not the truth.

This is the part that is hard for many people to accept when you are trying to cut some fat. Switching to smaller and more frequent meals throughout the day will actually cause your metabolism to stabilize.

You might be eating more food overall throughout the day, but eating even amounts of food throughout the day will help you to keep your metabolism higher. The key will be to make the following things happen:

1. Feed your body: Like we discussed before, the amount of food you give your body will affect your metabolism. If you don’t want your body to go into survival mode and save all the fat on your body, don’t starve it.

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Continue reading about Pumping up Your Metabolism, Part 2

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…)

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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