Muscle Mass Diet

Nothing, and I reiterate nothing, is more important to changing your body than your 'muscle mass diet'. I stand behind this 110% percent. Remember a little earlier, I mentioned that your body is a factor of inputs and outputs? Well, what you are is what you eat and this is never more true than in body building. The muscle mass diet I recommend is based on two things:

You are:

1) not a vegetarian

2) you eat fish.

If you tick both these boxes, I can guarantee you will be successful if you train even moderately well.

One of the hard parts is that the diet aspect has no glory to it. Nil. None. Nothing. it’s a real hard thing to keep up, because eating is such a conditional part of us that to try and change it, is earth moving stuff. Just ask any over weight person who trys to diet, its horrible!

The muscle mass diet shift is no different. Its going to be hard and you must keep it up to succeed. Fortunately, I can tell you that because you are either already a body builder or want to become one, you are at an advantage. You will already possess that inbuilt desire to be better than you are, which is highly motivating and helps us succeed.

So back to our muscle mass diet, just what sort of foods will we be eating? Well, high protein is high priority in this game. That means meat and lots of it! Vegetarians can succeed, its just 10 times as hard. Look at Bill Pearl, he did it to a world level, and I tell you, if you can eat broad beans and sprouts by the kilo every day, you can do it too. For me, a feed of chicken is a lot easier, and more palatable.

The sort of things you must be eating are chicken breast, red meats (beef lamb mutton chevon venison etc), fishes both white and red fish such as salmon, and in particular the tuna families. This is where around half of the daily protein intake comes from. This base will form your diet, and always prepare them with the minimum of sauces, fillings and condiments for best results.

Secondly, you want to be right into vast amounts of vegetables, both green complex leafy vegetables, to tubers and starchy carbohydrate fuels like potatoes. A personal favourite of mine is broccoli, I find it tastes awesome and it provides unparalleled amounts of vitamins and complex fibre. Spinach, beet, carrot, sweet potato, cauliflower, beans, peas, corn and any other fresh vegetables are ideal too. This will provide vitamins for amino production and fibre for regular and efficient processing of the complex protein chains found in the meats we will be eating. Some vegetables are also high in protein, such as beans in particular.

Around the other half of our protein will come from supplementary intake. Yes, im referring to whey and protein shakes and powders. From experience, you are best to concentrate your effort on the 70% protein content and above products. Avoid anything that contains to much carbohydrate, sugar and fill in. Anything termed ‘Weight gain’ or similar, is generally no good! Read the label and you’ll find a lot of sugar/carb in these crap products. You will become a master of reading ingredients labels in a short space of time!

The best protein supplements will be close to 80% pure protein, will have little added flavour and look for fresh mixes with shorter shelf life (from the date of production) as quality product will have less preservative and more protein. The rate at which you need to consume it negates the possibility of it expiring at home, that’s for sure!

Having shakes will enable you to get plenty of dairy into your muscle mass diet, as the base will be milk. Don’t be shy of whole fat milk, the fats contain valuable colostrum and it tastes awesome too. There is nothing wrong with adding in yogurt, egg and berries/bananas etc into your shake to boost it up. It tastes great!

The same tips apply for protein bars, which I have found are usually weasel products designed to look good on the gym counter. I have found far to many of these bars contain a lot of sugar and very little desirable protein. My rule is if its not at least 20% protein by weight, im not interested in it as part of my muscle mass diet!