Page 2 of: How I Added 60lbs. of Muscle

Daily Diet

The human body’s metabolism wants to maintain a steady weight. In order to achieve weight gain, I needed to take in more calories than what my body needed to maintain itself. This is where a little tuning is required as nobody knows off the bat how much calories they need to surpass their maintenance calories. I started at 2000 calories daily and worked my way up from there. The goal is to gain roughly 1-2lbs a week. And this should be relatively easy for those who have been absent from the gym for a long time as the strenuous workouts will shock the body.

Let me warn you: Be prepared to eat. if you’re trying to gain weight, then currently you have a fast metabolism and/or do not eat enough. Either way, you’ll be shoving food down your throat every few hours—and not just food you love, but healthy food. Not that it matters because a few weeks in and eating will no longer be a pleasure, but a chore.

To give you an idea of what I ate, here’s a sample of my daily diet.

There’s a structure to my eating schedule and you can tailor your own as long as you follow these key points:

• In general, you should eat enough grams of protein that is about 1.5 times your body weight. For example at 200lbs. you need to eat 300g of protein daily. Keep in mind that your body can only convert about 40g of protein per meal. So any more than that and it’s just going to end up in the toilet.
• Have a big breakfast. Unless you sleepwalk and eat, your body hasn’t had any new food to turn into energy, so replenish big.
• Don’t skip out on vegetables! I never counted greens towards my calories as I’ve been told to consider it a bonus—although it’s a necessary “bonus”.
• No carbs after 8pm. At this point your not very active and the body doesn’t need to energy. If you do take it in, chances are it will be stored as fat cells.
• When you go to sleep at night, the body continues to burn energy via your last meal. When that runs empty, your body begins to break itself down by converting stored fat and muscle into energy. This is when your body goes catabolic and you want to avoid this as much as possible. To do so, I ate slow digesting foods as my last meal. Examples of slow digesting foods are natural peanut butter, milk, nuts, and cottage cheese. Usually, I blended Muscle Milk (weight gain supplement) and peanut butter.
• I yo-yo’d my daily diet between workout and non-workout days. Since I’m not as active on non-workout days, I don’t need to take in as much supplements. I would vary by 400-600 calories. Keep in mind that your body is still repairing itself long after you’ve been to the gym. So give it the necessary building blocks to develop new muscle.

« Previous: Introduction | Next: Force Feeding »