Nutrition: A Step-By-Step Guide to Eating Healthy, Burning Fat, and Building Muscle

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Introduction

[PART1]

How Muscles Grow

If you were given one car to drive for the rest of your life, which would you rather have?

1.A fine-tuned sports car with a powerful engine and sleek exterior, or…
2.An old beater car with an engine that rattles the rusted frame?

Your body is your vehicle. You’re stuck in it for the rest of your life. So you might as well rebuild its engine and streamline its visual appeal.

And here’s the really great thing about the human body. Unlike a machine, it does not wear out and become weaker with use. Rather than wearing down, the human body gets stronger when you use it.

Or does it?

The real truth is this. The human body adapts to use. And it does all of that adaptation when you’re not using it.

ou don’t grow muscle while you’re working out. Your muscles grow when you feed and rest them after your workout is finished.

And that’s why it’s important for you to understand how nutrition works.

What you fuel your body with matters. Without the right building blocks for muscular repair, your workouts will not be as effective.

So let’s talk about getting ripped. Let’s break it down, remove all the complexity, and focus on what it takes to succeed.

Our nutrition guide is based on the best mix of science and real world success. By the time you finish this brief course, you’ll know more than 99% of the people you see working out.

And the best part? You only need to master a few basic principles. Once you know them, these simple concepts will help grow your muscles for the rest of your life. It’s a small investment of time for a lifetime of payoff.

Simplicity for success

The whole purpose of this course is to make it easy and automatic for you to always eat the right stuff. That way you’ll get big and muscular fast.

Our nutrition system takes the guesswork out of choosing what to eat. You’ll just follow a few simple principles and get great results.

Once you understand the basic ideas, you’ll be able to adjust them to fit your personal preferences. That makes our system flexible. We’ve found flexibility is important for your long-term success.

This guide is also about how to save time. Eating right for muscular growth can be time-consuming. It’s easier to just eat what everyone else is eating.

After all, fast food is called that for a reason. It’s fast and easy. But with just a few of the secrets you’re going to learn in this course, you’ll discover how to fuel your body (with the right stuff) even faster than you could get a meal from a fast food restaurant.

Do you want to look normal?

If not, you cannot expect to eat “normal.” So yes, you can expect us to ask you to stretch beyond your normal comfort zone.

But in the process, you will begin fueling your body with the kind of high-octane nutrients that will harden your muscles and force them to grow.

Don’t give up! While we’ve made our best attempt to make things simple for you, nutrition is complex. Learning to eat right is way more complicated than learning how to exercise right.

If you have never learned the basics about nutrition, you will need to read this guide more than once. The first time you’ll feel a bit overwhelmed. That’s perfectly normal. The second time, everything will start to click and you’ll understand what you need to do. So take as many notes as possible on paper. Now let’s get to work!
 
[PART2]

What should I eat?

You’ll hear all kinds of different advice about nutrition. One guy eats a ton of carbs while another guy eats a lot of grass-fed beef. One guy talks about the importance of vegetables, while another fitness guru says to forget about vegetables and take vitamins instead.

So who’s right? How do you know what to eat?

Fortunately, there are two things scientists agree on when it comes to building muscle. To maximize muscle growth, you should…

1.Eat more protein than “normal people” and…

2.Eat very low glycemic meals.

We’ll explain what both of those mean as we go along. But just to make sure we’re on the same page, let’s start with the basics.

The Basics

Just like a car needs fuel to operate, your brain and body need fuel. Energy that humans can use as fuel comes from three sources: carbohydrate, protein, and fat. These are called the macronutrients.

If you ever hear health gurus arguing about the best “macronutrient profile,” they’re talking about fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. They’re debating the best mix of those three food sources.

The word “carbohydrate” actually means any food made out of sugar. You’ve probably heard the term “complex carbohydrate.” Complex carbohydrates are things like bread, potatoes, rice, and corn. They are still sugar, but they digest more slowly than pure table sugar. That’s because complex carbohydrates are made out of several sugar molecules linked together. So it takes longer for your body to break them down into the only form of sugar your body can use, called glucose.

When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks them down to turn them into the simplest one-molecule form of sugar. It’s called glucose. Glucose is the fuel your brain uses all day and all night. Without a steady supply of glucose to the brain, you would die within six hours.

Fortunately, we don’t have to eat every six hours to survive. That’s because your body can store energy. Your body stores energy in several different ways. The most obvious way most people think about is body fat.

When you eat more food than you need, your body turns those excess calories into fat. Your body can later break down that fat and turn it into sugar.

It does that using a complex chemical process. But all you need to know is that even if you were stranded on a deserted island with no carbohydrates, your brain would still be running on glucose1 (the sugar in your blood). That’s because your body can transform fat into glucose.

And of course, that’s why you would look skinnier when rescuers finally pick you up off the deserted island. While stranded, you burned up the fat on your body, slowly breaking it down to turn it into energy to keep you alive.

Since the brain can only run on sugar in the form of glucose, it makes carbohydrates seem very important, doesn’t it? But oddly enough, you can live a long life without ever eating another bite of carbohydrates. The same cannot be said about protein or fat. That’s because your body is capable of transforming both fat and protein into sugar. But it doesn’t work the other way around. There are certain types of proteins and fats your body cannot make. You have to get those from what you eat.

You probably already know why protein is important. It’s because your body does not stay the same. Your body is always repairing and replacing cells, which requires protein. Plus, your muscles are made mostly of protein.

So you can fuel your body with carbohydrates, protein, and fat. You have to eat some protein and some fat just to survive. But we’re not talking about survival here. You want to know which combination of these nutrients will help your muscles grow the most! Let’s start by talking about how carbohydrate fuels your muscles.

While your muscles are made out of protein, they run on energy from carbohydrates2. Your muscle stores up the sugar from carbohydrates. When muscles store energy from sugar, it’s called glycogen.

Glycogen gets used up during a hard workout. You should replenish that glycogen before your next workout. That will allow you to push your muscles hard during the next workout. That, in turn, will stimulate muscle growth.

So the question is, how much carbohydrate should you eat? Well, the problem with eating too much carbohydrate is that it can also make you fat. That’s because carbohydrates trigger the release of a hormone into your blood stream. It’s a growth hormone called insulin.

Insulin causes both fat cells and muscles to grow. We want to maximize muscle growth while minimizing fat. The next section explains how to accomplish that by eating a low glycemic index diet.

Force Carbs to Fuel Your Muscles instead of Making You Fat

When you eat carbs, your body breaks it down into the kind of sugar your body can use (called glucose). For some carb sources this process happens very quickly. For other carb sources this happens more slowly.

The faster it happens, the more sugar gets dumped into your blood stream all at once. The higher your blood sugar gets, the more your body reacts by releasing insulin into your blood stream.

Insulin has one very important job: to lower your blood sugar. It does so by causing the cells of your body to suck up all the sugar out of your blood. Both muscle cells and fat cells will absorb the sugar out of your blood stream.

Carbs that dump sugar into your bloodstream really fast after you eat them are called “high glycemic index” carbs. Examples are cornflakes, bread, syrup, table sugar, and mashed potatoes. Carbs that take a longer time to break down are called low glycemic index carbs. Examples of low glycemic index carbs include yams, pears, peaches, oatmeal, peas, quinoa, and pasta.

What’s the difference you ask? There are a lot of factors that affect how quickly your body can extract the sugar from a given food.

For example, even though bread and pasta are made out of the same thing (wheat flour) the processing of the wheat into these two different products changes how long it takes your stomach to break down the carbs into a form that can be absorbed into the bloodstream.

There are a lot of factors that determine how quickly your body can extract sugar from the food you eat. But you don’t need to bother learning all of them. That’s because there are two factors that make a bigger difference than all the rest of them combined. We’ll get to that in just a minute.

What is the glycemic index?

But what does the word “glycemic index” actually mean? It’s like this. Scientists were trying to figure out a good way to explain this concept about how some foods spike our blood sugar really fast compared to others. So they came up with a way to measure it. It’s called the glycemic index.

The glycemic index is just a number. Pure glucose (the simplest form of sugar) has a glycemic index of 100. Everything else gets compared to that. So if you eat 50 grams of whole-wheat bread, it gets compared to what happens in your bloodstream when you eat 50 grams of glucose. To assign a glycemic index, scientists measure how much your blood sugar rises over the course of two hours after you eat a food.

Whole-wheat bread has a glycemic index of about 70, which means it raises blood sugar 70% as much as pure glucose does. So whole-wheat bread raises your blood sugar 30% less than glucose. Peas have a glycemic index of only 22. Peas raise blood sugar only 22% as much as pure glucose. So peas have an extremely low glycemic index.

Remember, when blood sugar goes up, your body releases insulin. Insulin pushes all the nutrients your body needs into the right places. So if you just finished a workout, and depleted your muscles of glycogen stores (carbohydrate energy stored in your muscles) it’s insulin that pushes the sugar out of your blood and into your muscles where you can use it for your next workout.

But your muscles can only store so much glycogen. Once those stores are full, insulin pushes the rest of the leftover excess blood sugar into your fat cells. Once the fat cells are full, your body begins to create new fat cells to fill. This is how we get fatter over time when we routinely eat meals that spike blood sugar.

We cannot live without insulin. We need it. But we need it in only very tiny amounts. Our bodies are not designed to handle the huge insulin surges that result from the way most people eat these days. It pushes too many of our calories into fat stores on our bodies.

And that’s why the glycemic index of the foods you eat is so important. The glycemic index is a term used to describe the degree to which things you eat raise your blood sugar. Some meals will cause your blood sugar to go sky high, while others will release a steady trickle of sugar into your bloodstream, just enough to keep everything running smoothly.

Eating protein and fat causes a very small insulin response, whereas eating carbohydrate can cause a very big insulin response. So if you have scrambled eggs for breakfast, your blood sugar will remain very low (because that’s just protein and fat). But if you have plain toast with jam for breakfast your blood sugar will go up very quickly as your body breaks down the bread into sugar (glucose). Your body will then release a lot of insulin to reduce that spike in blood sugar. And a lot of that blood sugar will be stored as body fat.

Here are the simple fact. Anything that is a carbohydrate eventually gets broken down into sugar in your blood stream. That’s not a bad thing unless your blood sugar goes up really fast.

But don’t just cut carbs out of your diet. Your workouts will go better if you have carbohydrates in your diet.

The trick is to reduce the speed of sugar release into your blood stream. You want a slow steady stream of sugar released into your blood stream. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make that happen.

All you have to do is make sure you eat fat and protein with your carbs.That way, even high glycemic index carbohydrates release their sugar more slowly into your blood stream. That’s because fat and protein slow down the digestion process.

Here’s the important thing to remember. Fat slows down digestion. It slows down the release of sugars from your belly to your blood stream. Protein does too.

That’s why some foods that have a lot of sugar in them, like peanut M&Ms or a Snickers bar, actually have a low glycemic index. It’s because there’s a lot of fat in the peanuts in those products. The fat slows down the digestion of the sugar. As a result, peanut M&Ms have a glycemic index of only 33, while French bread has a glycemic index of 95. French bread is made with almost no fat or protein, so it digests very fast.

Now, M&Ms and Snickers bars have the wrong kind of fat in in them, so don’t get in the habit of eating those all the time. But the general principle I’m pointing out here is important. You can reduce the glycemic index of any meal by including fat. We’ll talk about healthy forms of fat for this purpose later.

The other way you can lower the glycemic index of a meal is to include a lot of protein. Protein is also broken down very slowly, so the carbs you eat with protein don’t get funneled through your body as quickly.

The best plan is to include both protein and fat when you eat carbohydrates. Try to avoid eating carbohydrates like bread, pasta, potatoes or oats without adding fat and protein to your meal. Your morning bowl of oatmeal will be much healthier if you mix in some peanut butter (and cut out an equivalent amount of oatmeal calories).

To see a list of common foods, along with the glycemic index of each food, see Appendix A at the end of this guide. And if you’re interested in several examples of a high glycemic meal, and how to turn it into a low glycemic index meal, see Appendix B.

Now it’s time to back up a few steps and look at the big picture. We’ve been talking about the glycemic index. You now understand that it matters because it influences how your body handles the calories you eat. But there’s one more important factor you need to understand.

Muscles repair slowly. After your workout, your body needs time to gradually repair the micro damage to your muscles and grow them larger. In contrast, fat cells can grow very quickly any time excess calories are available.

So here’s what this means. High blood sugar speeds up fat gain but not muscle gain. You do need an excess of calories to trigger your body into growth mode, but the calories need to be consumed in a way that does not cause sudden spikes in your blood sugar. That’s why eating low glycemic index (G.I.) meals is the key to growing muscle without growing a lot of fat.

Let me explain it another way. Anyone who eats an excess of calories will grow. The question is, will that growth be mostly muscle or mostly fat? By eating low glycemic index meals (and working out) calories will be used to grow muscle instead of fat.



1- Technically, your brain would also start to run partly on ketones which are released when we have no carbs for an extended period of time. Ketones are like brain energy that comes from fat.

2- Some of you with more advanced knowledge of human physiology may know that muscles and the brain can technically also run on fat as an alternate source of fuel. To avoid confusing things for those just getting started I am sticking with a basic explanation of how the body works assuming carbohydrates are available.
 
[PART3]

The Basic Triggers Your Muscle Needs to Grow

When astronauts go to space, their muscles quickly begin to shrink. Scientists call this “muscular atrophy.” It happens to all of us when we don’t use our muscles. Muscular atrophy is the process of breaking down muscle tissue (essentially digesting your own muscles).

It happens for several reasons. Not using a muscle is the main reason. When you don’t use a muscle, it triggers your body to start breaking down that muscle. Muscle uses up calories even while you’re sleeping. So if you’re not going to use your muscle, your body will start to break it down in order to save energy.

The other reason atrophy happens is because your body is not getting enough protein, so it starts to break down your muscles to meet that need (since your muscles are made out of protein).

Astronauts lose a tremendous amount of muscle while orbiting in zero gravity in space. Without gravity, their neck muscles don’t even have to hold their head up straight let alone activate muscles to stand up out of a chair.

After an extended mission, an astronaut’s heart becomes so weak he or she has to be carried off the landing craft on a stretcher and rehabilitated before walking again. That’s because the heart does so little work to pump blood while they’re in space. The heart doesn’t have to pump blood against the force of gravity.

Also, their leg muscles atrophy, becoming much skinnier than they were when they left Earth. All that because muscle isn’t being used. The same thing would happen to you if you had surgery and couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. In as little as two weeks you can lose a significant amount of muscle if you don’t use them at all.

As you know, it’s the opposite of this effect that allows us to develop uncommon muscular strength. When we push our bodies beyond a comfortable limit, the body responds by trying to adapt.

When your muscle is pushed to the point of failure (meaning it simply cannot continue an exercise for even one more repetition) the muscle fibers experience a tiny amount of damage. This damage signals the body to “do something about it.”

And what does the body do about it? It makes those muscle fibers thicker, and sometimes even adds new muscle fibers in order to handle this new load you have been forcing upon it. In other words, your muscles get bigger and stronger.

Amino Acids

But to build muscle, your body needs certain ingredients. It cannot manufacture muscle out of thin air. You have to feed it the right kind of building blocks. So what are those building blocks your body needs? Technically, it’s just something called “amino acids.”

You probably already know you need to eat protein so that your body has the necessary building blocks for building muscle. But you may not know why. So lets briefly review the reason why your body needs protein to recover from an intense workout.

Proteins are just chains of amino acids connected together. Every protein in your body is made of amino acids. And every kind of protein you could eat is made out of amino acids. Proteins differ in the amount of various kinds of amino acids they contain. Your body likes some amino acids better than others (for the purposes of building muscle).

But the one thing you need to understand is this. You get the building blocks for muscle repair by eating protein. That’s because protein contains amino acids that your body can use to build muscle.

Think of it this way. When you eat protein (like chicken, eggs, fish, or milk) it’s like your body just received a package in the mail. Your body opens up that package and discovers building blocks called amino acids. Your body sort through those amino acids, looking for the ones it needs to repair your muscle tissue after an intense workout. After taking the pieces it needs and using it to build your muscles bigger, the rest gets broken down and used as fuel.

So far we’ve established that your body needs two things in order to grow muscle. It needs a little bit of damage caused by exercise to trigger its defense mechanism (building larger muscles), and it needs amino acids from the protein you eat. But there’s one more thing.

You can barely scrape along with the two things we’ve covered so far. You can build muscles that will adapt to a hard workout slowly over time. But if you want to grow muscle fast, there’s a third signal you need to give to your body. Let’s talk about that next.

Micro-Bulk Then Micro-Cut

First, let me tell you how actor Henry Cavill built his super ‘Man of Steel’ body. If you watched the movie (Man of Steel), you’ll notice the director wanted an actor with abs of steel to match the idea most people have of Superman. There were several scenes where the Superman character walked around with no shirt.

Now, keep in mind, Hollywood is a serious business. It may seem like fun and entertainment to us, but millions of investor dollars get poured into each movie, and those movies are designed to make a profit. So they find the best scientists and fitness trainers around when they need to whip someone into shape for a role.

In an interview with Cavill, he revealed the nutritional plan he was required to follow in the year leading up to his role in the film, “Man of Steel.” For the first six months his diet involved eight meals per day at 4000 to 6000 total calories per day. He often washed down fatty and protein-rich snacks like whipped-cream coconut milkshakes worth 1,400 calories each.

Then for the next six months leading up to the time when they would start shooting scenes for the film, his calories were significantly cut below his basic metabolic needs. He was consuming only 2500 calories per day. For a guy that’s well over six feet tall with that much muscle (put on in the prior six months), 2500 calories is way below his daily metabolic need. When asked if his trainer required him to stay away from certain foods, he “no.” They only required him to stick to his total calorie allotment.

He ended up putting on a staggering 30 pounds of pure muscle during his year of hard-core training. And he was so ripped when they did the no-shirt scene, they didn’t even need to artificially touch up his abs with special effects.

So here’s the third trigger for growth. The third signal is a cascade of natural hormones your body only releases when an excess of calories is available. It only takes a slight surplus of calories in order to trigger hormone changes in your body including the release of a lot more human growth hormone (HGH).

HGH is a powerful trigger for muscular growth, but your body won’t release much of it when it’s trying to conserve calories. When on a diet (or when eating just enough calories for your daily need), your body will resist building new muscle. It will slowly repair the damage your exercise created in your muscle, but it will be hesitant to build those muscles much bigger, and I’ll tell you why.

Muscle is metabolically expensive. What that means is your muscles burn more calories than other body tissue (like fat, which can just sit there on your body doing nothing). So your body has instincts not to build muscle when extra calories are not available. Your body will hold off the cascade of hormones that trigger muscle growth.

You may be wondering, “What if I am already overweight, a bit too pudgy for my abs to show?” If that’s the case, don’t worry. We’ll cover everything you need to know to shred off that excess fat later in this guide. For now, just learn this basics about how your body works.

If your body needs 2000 calories a day just to stay the same, eating 2200 calories per day you will trigger hormone changes that tell your body “It’s time to grow!” And if this message is received during the same week that your muscles have been pushed to their limit, guess what happens. Guess where the extra calories will be used. That’s right, toward the growth of muscle.

This is very different than how most people live. If you do what most people do, you’ll get a little bit fatter each day without gaining any new muscle mass. That’s because most people eat more than the body needs but they don’t stress their muscles through serious, strenuous, muscular exercise.

The truth is, with an excess of calories, you’ll gain muscle but also some body fat. But that extra fat is easy to get rid of once you’ve built new muscle. After a few weeks of eating more than you need, you’ll cut back and eat less than you need.

But won’t you just lose all the muscle you’ve gained you go on a diet? No, you won’t! And here’s why. You’ll be eating a lot of protein even during your diet. So your body won’t break down your muscles to get the protein it needs. Plus, you’ll keep working out. Working out tells your body the muscle is still needed. So it won’t break down your muscles.

So you’ll gain muscle and fat when eating more calories than you need, and you’ll lose a little bit of muscle and fat when you eat fewer calories than you need. But you’ll end up with a net gain of muscle and a reduction of total body fat.

What we just covered is super important. So let’s review it again.

When you eat low G.I. meals and a high-protein diet, something interesting happens. During the muscle building phase (with higher calories) your body does not put on much fat because most of the excess calories and growth hormone goes toward repairing and growing the muscles you’ve been exercising. Then, when you’re in the cutting phase (with lower calories) your body starts burning fat and breaking down muscle to make up for the calorie deficit. But it breaks down very little of your muscle because of two reasons…


1.it’s getting plenty of protein already from your diet and
2.your workouts signal the body that your muscles are still needed and must be preserved.

You see, the body needs two things to survive, protein and essential fats. Your body cannot create proteins or essential fats. It has to get them from your diet.

Your body is constantly remaking itself through cell division for everything from repairing your skin to growing your hair. For those processes to occur, certain fats and proteins are required.

So when you are in a restricted calorie diet, your body tries to make up for the deficit in needed calories by breaking down your fat stores and your muscle stores. That’s why we get skinnier when we go on a diet.

The great news is, by keeping protein levels high during the dieting phase, you can cause the body to leave most of your muscle tissue alone while getting rid of excess fat tissue. That means you have bigger muscles and less fat hiding your muscles than when you started.

Professional bodybuilders do this cycle of increased calories followed by decreased calories, but they do it to the extreme. We don’t need to go to the extremes they do to get amazing results. They will go for six months of eating a lot more than their body needs.

Some of the most famous bodybuilders actually look fat during the off-season when they’re bulking up. But then they spend a full six months cutting calories until they have only 4% body fat for bodybuilding competitions. The whole time they ate a low G.I. diet and high-protein.

But we’ve discovered a secret. Bill Phillips was working as the CEO of a nutritional company called AES when he asked the question, “Isn’t there a way to do this without getting fat?” He began to experiment along with other muscle enthusiasts. And what they discovered was very interesting.

You can do two-week cycles where you eat a little bit more for two weeks and then eat a little bit less for two weeks and get all the benefits that come from the six month version. Plus, two weeks is not nearly long enough to start looking pudgy. So you always look lean and muscular while still taking advantage of the natural growth hormones your body releases when an excess of calories is available.

In fact, the hormonal changes your body goes through during the overfeeding phase actually make it easier to lose fat when you switch to the low calorie phase. And it works in the other direction too! When you cut calories for two weeks, it primes your body for growth as soon as you start eating more. So you end up growing muscle faster while staying lean.

So let’s quickly review. All you really need to build muscle is a tiny amount of damage that comes from exercise, plus rest and amino acids for repair.

But if you want to supercharge that process, you can go through two-week cycles in which you go slightly above your basic calorie need for two weeks and then go slightly below your calorie need for another two weeks. Then you just repeat this process until you’ve reached a level of muscular development you’re satisfied with.

It’s important to eat right during both bulking and cutting phases. In other words, eat low glycemic index meals. In the next section we’re going to go over four simple principles that will make it more clear how to eat.
 
[PART4]

Four Simple Principles to Master Bar Brothers Nutrition

These are the only four principles you really need to succeed with our method. All the rest of the information in this course is so you understand why you’re doing this.

Understanding why is very important too. That’s because it allows you to be flexible and make the system fit your unique lifestyle and situation.

Remember, you don’t have to be perfect. Any movement in the right direction will help you gain muscle. Here are the four principles to follow as much as you can.

1.Eat some protein and fat with every meal.
2.Get 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day.
3.Trickle carbs instead of dumping them into your blood stream all at once.
4.Eat the lowest glycemic index carbs that still taste good.

Let’s briefly summarize the reason behind each of these basic rules for success.

First, eat some protein and fat with every meal. The reason is simple. Including fat and protein slows down the digestion of carbohydrates. The point is to avoid eating carbs by themselves. (Hint: If you follow this principle well, you can ignore principle number four and still do pretty well with our system.)

Principle two says you should get one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. We’re going to discuss that principle in the next section. So let’s set that one aside momentarily.

Principle number three says to trickle carbs instead of dumping them into your blood stream all at once. This principle is the reason why many people trying to build muscle eat five or six meals per day instead of two or three meals like “normal” people.

By spreading out your total calories into a larger number of meals you can eat more carbohydrates across the course of the day with less of a spike in insulin with each meal.

The opposite of this approach is the one used by sumo wrestlers in Japan. These athletes are very muscular, but they are also extremely fat. Can you guess how many meals they eat per day? One!

They train hard in the afternoons and then gorge themselves on as much food as they can possibly fit in their stomach just before going to sleep. This causes a surge of insulin that causes their total body mass to continue increasing. They want to be as big as possible (both muscle and fat) since they use their body weight to win their competitions.

When you’re trying to develop a lean and muscular body, you want to do the opposite of the sumo wrestlers. You want to spread out your calories across the day.

You don’t have to be perfect about this. If you can only do four meals, that’s better than three. If you can do this on weekends but not the rest of the week, then do that. Don’t be perfectionistic, just be the best you can be.

Finally, eat the lowest glycemic index foods that still taste good. The glycemic index tells you how much a given carbohydrate will raise your blood sugar. The lower the better.

When selecting carbohydrate sources to routinely use in your meals, look for ones that have a low glycemic index. See Appendix A for a list of carbohydrate with corresponding glycemic index ratings. Here’s a reference point for what is high, medium, and low when talking about the glycemic index:

Carbs with a G.I. of 55 or less = Low (very good)

Carbs with a G.I. of 56- 69 = Medium (okay)

Carbs with a G.I. of 70 or higher = High (bad)

Also, realize you can always look up the glycemic index of any food online. You’ll quickly learn that low glycemic index carbs don’t taste as good as high glycemic index carbs. That’s why we say to eat the lowest glycemic index carbs that still taste good to you. We don’t want you to get frustrated and give up.

Now let’s get back to principle number two. In order to maximize your muscular development, you should eat more protein than you’re used to.

How Much Protein Do I Actually Need?

You don’t need tons of protein just to survive and live a “normal” life. But remember, we’re not going for “normal.”

For most people who are trying to build new muscle, the biggest nutritional problem they have is that they simply don’t eat enough protein. That’s because nature has designed your taste buds to prefer carbs and fat.

You inherited your genetics from people who lived a hunter and gatherer lifestyle. Carbohydrates were only found in small portions back then. That’s why your body is not designed to handle large surges in blood sugar.

While advances in agriculture and industrialization has made carbohydrates available all the time, your genetics have not caught up with this change. Your body is still designed to handle only a small amount of carbohydrate. But because carbohydrates are a good source of calories and could therefore help with survival, your genetics draw you toward anything that is sweet.

Protein doesn’t taste as good as carbs. It’s easy to overeat carbs, but hard to overeat protein. But if there’s one simple thing we want you to change about the way you eat, it would be this. Eat more protein and actually count your protein grams to make sure you’re getting enough.

Are you eating a slight surplus of calories to stimulate growth? Are you creating a slight calorie deficit to shred off some extra fat? Either way, keep your protein consumption high.

You may be wondering how much protein you actually need. You should aim for approximately one gram of protein per day for each pound you weigh (or 2.2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight). So if you are a 160 pound person, you should aim for 160 grams of protein per day. Divided up into five meals per day, that would mean approximately 32 grams of protein per meal.

One gram of protein has 4 calories in it. So eating 160 grams of protein per day would give you 640 calories (160 grams times 4 calories each).

Let’s say this 160 pound person is aiming for 2000 calories per day. 640÷2000 = 0 .32, which is 32 percent. That’s just about perfect for the macronutrient profile we’re aiming for (33 percent from protein). Don’t worry, we’ll explain later how to determine your own daily calorie needs.

Some experts recommend one gram of protein for each pound of lean body mass, meaning you first have to figure out your body fat percentage and subtract that from your total weight. We don’t recommend that unless you are significantly overweight.

That’s because when you are just a little overweight, getting even more protein will help you to lose weight. That’s because protein is very filling (won’t leave much room in your stomach for other food). Plus, protein forces your meals to have a low glycemic index (because it slows down carb digestion).

What is a Macronutrient Profile?

Protein, fats, and carbohydrates are called macronutrients. Just to make sure you know what we’re talking about, here are some examples of each. This is not a recommendation of what to eat. This is just a list of which foods are in each category.

Protein Sources: eggs, fish, all forms of meat, also makes up a portion of beans, lentils, nuts and milk, and even shows up a little bit in grains like oats.

Carbohydrate Sources: anything that has sugar in it whether simple or complex including whole-wheat bread, white bread, table sugar, fruit (sugar in the form of fructose), some parts of milk (a form of sugar called lactose), pasta, oatmeal, honey, and the small amount of sugar you get from vegetables.

Fat Sources: butter, nut oils, vegetable oils, coconut oil, fat from milk and cheese

You don’t want to continue eating the way you have been and just add protein and fat. You actually want to decrease the percentage of your daily calories that come from carbohydrates and increase the percent that comes from proteins and healthy fats.

Our recommendation is to aim for approximately 33% of your calories from each of the three macronutrients, protein, fat, and carbohydrate. That’s going to be your macronutrient profile (33%, 33%, 33%). By the way, if that much fat scares you, just keep reading.

You’ll never get this ratio exactly perfect, so don’t waste your time trying. That’s why it doesn’t matter that the split actually adds up to 99% instead of 100%. The point is to try to get approximately one third of your total calories from each of those macronutrient sources.

Here’s something you need to keep in mind when you strive to do this. While each gram of protein and carbohydrate has 4 calories in it, a gram of fat has 9 calories in it. So if you ate the same number of grams from each macronutrient group, you’d be getting way too much fat. Always keep that in mind when checking the nutrition label of foods you’re eating.

New Discoveries about Fat

Eating a higher percentage of your calories in the form of healthy fats is one of the easiest ways to lower the glycemic index of your meals. But haven’t doctors been telling us to cut fat out of our diet for years? Let’s take a look at that issue.

Your body can survive without any carbs. It cannot survive without protein and fat. The fats your body requires in order to live are called essential fatty acids. You don’t really need a lot of essential fatty acids, but it’s an important starting point to realize that you were designed to eat fat.

One of the reasons the medical community has been concerned about fat consumption is because of what seems like common sense. Back before nutritional science had progressed to the point it is at now, the logic went like this: “Fat on the human body and in the arteries is bad. Eating fat causes fat to circulate in the human bloodstream. Therefore, eating fat must cause the body to store that fat and thereby make people unhealthy.”

Well, it turns out that eating fat does not cause you to store fat on your body. It’s eating too many calories that does that (regardless of whether those calories came from protein, fat, or carbs).

The medical community also used to have concerns about cholesterol. The “lipid theory” of heart disease went something like this: “Certain kinds of lipids (fats like cholesterol) stick to our artery walls, gradually forming plaques that harden and narrow the space in our arteries. Eventually, this leads to heart disease.”

Let’s address each of these issues based on what the newest nutritional science has revealed. Again, these are not our own opinions or our own research studies. We are just summarizing the surprising turn of events that the top level experts have been sharing in just the past few years.

First of all, eating fat does not make you fat. Total calorie consumption relative to total basic calorie needs is the only thing that has ever been proven to cause weight gain or weight loss.

If you’re eating the right number of calories, your body doesn’t really care which kind of macronutrient they came from. Your muscles are just as happy to burn calories that came from fat as they are to burn calories that came from protein or carbs.

But here’s the kicker. It turns out that replacing some of your insulin-producing carbohydrate calories with healthy fat calories can significantly change hormones in your body in a way that favors muscle development.

A prime example of this is cholesterol. Want to boost your testosterone levels so you build muscle faster? Just eat more cholesterol.

Careful scientific research in the last 10 years has shown that dietary cholesterol (meaning when you eat cholesterol containing foods like egg yolks) has no significant impact on cholesterol build-up in your veins. What does seem to raise cholesterol levels is a sedentary lifestyle and a high glycemic index diet1.

But the really interesting thing we’ll come back to later is the way your hormonal balance changes in favor of building muscle rather than fat when you consume fewer insulin-stimulating carbs and replace those with testosterone-stimulating fats like grass fed butter and eggs.

Her are the right sources of healthy fats to eat:


-Olive oil
-Nut oils
-Grass fed butter (meaning the cows graze on grass rather than being fed grain)
-MCT Oil
-Grass-fed beef, pork, and lamb.
-Eggs from free range chickens
-Wild caught salmon

Fat to avoid:

-Hydrogenated oils
-margarine
-anything that includes high amounts of sugar or refined carbohydrate along with the fat (e.g. chocolate chip cookies, French fries, mashed potatoes with butter, ice cream).
-Too much vegetable oil such as Canola Oil or corn oil (because the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids makes it inflammatory and thus less healthy).

So how much fat should you eat? You should aim for about 25% to 33% of your total calories from healthy sources of fat. Most of the time you won’t have to go out of your way at all to get the necessary level of fat in your diet. That’s because you’ll be eating healthy sources of protein that will naturally include fat (for example, eggs, salmon, steak, or cottage cheese).

If you can’t wrap your mind around the idea of eating that much fat, or you’re still convinced that eating fat makes people fat, then you can drop your fat calories to 20%. But if you do that, it’s better to replace those calories with even more protein rather than more carbs. Your long-term health will suffer if you eat a diet that is primarily carbohydrates.

Your insulin sensitivity will begin to drop, which means your fat cells will happily store carbohydrate. At the same time, your muscles will gradually stop responding to the insulin signal that would usually cause them to grow.

Eat Vegetables for Fiber and Health

With all this talk about your basic macronutrient profile, it’s important not to leave out a quick discussion of vegetables. As you increase your fat and protein intake, you’ll get less fiber from carbohydrate sources. Vegetables are the best way to get low glycemic index carbs along with all the fiber your body needs to function optimally.

Vegetables have all kinds of nutrients in them, many of which science probably has not even discovered yet. The vitamins and minerals found in vegetables are important for your health.

The unfortunate truth is, unless you have your own garden, vegetables are expensive. They’re the least calorie-dense food in your diet and they cost a lot more than other foods. That’s because they’re perishable and therefore difficult to transport and keep in stock at stores.

Just keep in mind that it’s your health on the line, not just your budget. Eat as many vegetables as your budget can realistically allow. They are the best source of slow-digesting carbs, they have good flavor, and the fiber will keep your intestinal tract working the way it was meant to.

Here’s the best way to include vegetables in your meals. By bags of frozen vegetables. Then microwave them and include one or two cups of vegetables with at least one of your meals each day (vegetables with two meals per day would be better).

Buying a bag of mixed vegetables is the easiest way to go. But here are some of the best vegetables with the highest health benefits:


1.broccoli
2.Green peas
3.snow peas
4.green beans

There are many others, but these have good flavor and high nutritional value. When you buy frozen vegetables, you spend a lot less money than if you bought fresh vegetables.

These days, vegetables are frozen almost immediately after they are picked. As a result, the frozen vegetables retain nearly all of their vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. So frozen vegies are almost as good as fresh vegetables but with less work to clean and chop them up. Plus, they come with a lower price tag.

Buying canned vegetables is also an option. But that usually comes with too much sodium (salt) used in the canning process as a preservative. The vegetables will be cheaper, but of a lower nutritional value. So microwave a cup of frozen mixed vegetables along with some butter that will melt over them and make them more palatable and flavorful.

1= Technically it’s the heart-disease causing “bad cholesterol” (LDL) that goes up while the good kind of cholesterol that acts like a sponge to keep your arteries squeaky clean (HDL cholesterol) goes down when people eat low fat, high carb diets.
 
[PART5]

How much should I eat?

Are you too skinny, too fat, or just right? If you really want to show off your muscles, you should aim to get below 10 percent body fat (as a man) or 25 percent body fat (if you’re a woman).

You can buy a pair of inexpensive skin calipers to get a reading of your own fat percentage and track it over time, but even that method is fairly inaccurate. It’s just difficult (without spending a ton of money) to get an accurate assessment of your body fat percentage. A better method is just to use a camera to track your progress.

The human eye can detect changes in body fat percentage better than skin calipers (in our opinion). And it’s how you look that really matters anyway, right?

To give you a sense of what various body fat percentages look like, I’ve included several pictures below along with an estimate of the body fat percentage for each individual shown.

Generally speaking, the more muscular you are, the more your muscles will show through even when you have a significant amount of body fat. And the less body fat you have, the more your muscles will show through. Obviously, the best situation is to have well-developed muscles and a low body fat percentage.

If you are currently above 10 percent body fat, start our nutrition plan by cutting your calories down to 90 percent of your basic metabolic need. You can find a free online calculator for estimating your daily caloric needs. https://manytools.org/handy/bmr-calculator/

Men are considered obese at 30 percent body fat (35 percent for women). To look extremely lean (ripped) it is possible to get down to 3 to 6 percent body fat for men (9 to 12 percent for women). But that’s hard to maintain long-term. We recommend you go for very lean, which would be anything below nine percent for men or below 15 percent for women.

You cannot go for zero percent body fat. Your body goes through all kinds of dysfunctional reactions when you have no body fat. It’s just not healthy, so don’t think of it as an option to aim for.

Here are some general guidelines to figure out where you are at now in terms of body fat percentage. If you have love handle spillover (a manly muffin top) you’re probably close to the 20-25-ish% range.

At around 10% body fat, men start to see abdominal definition (in other words, you have nice abs). The definition of your abdominal muscles may not be very deep at that level, but you can see your ab muscles without flexing them. You’ll also be able to see the distinct anatomy of muscles where your shoulders tie in with your biceps.

When you hit the single digits, you start to look crazy ripped. Those are the guys you see on muscle building magazine covers. Muscle stands out with obvious separation in the quads and triceps even without getting a pump from working out.

If a lean, muscular physique is your goal, don’t stress out about trying to get to a certain body fat percentage. Instead, just keep a log of photos labeled with the date. Use your phone to take pictures if you have a phone with that function.

A tape measure circumference of your waist will also be helpful if you have a bit of a potbelly right now. Photos and a tape measure will help you monitor your progress.

Determine Your Caloric Needs

The first step to making any change in your physique is to figure out how many calories you need just to maintain your current body mass.

Use an online calculator. There are a lot of good, free calculators available online, or the Link Above.

But keep in mind, this is only an estimate to use as a starting point. Use a scale to watch your weight across the course of a week. Then adjust your calorie intake up or down based on what is (or isn’t) happening.

During the weight gain phase you should be gaining about two pounds per week. During the calorie restriction phase you should be losing between one and two pounds per week. At the other side of one of these cycles, more of your body weight will be muscle and less of it fat.

Also, if you put on a lot of muscle fast with our Bar Brothers workout system, don’t forget that this new muscle mass means your basic calorie needs will increase. That’s because muscles burn calories all day long.

You’ll occasionally need to increase your calorie intake as you gain lean muscle mass. Make small adjustments and monitor for at least a week before deciding if you need to adjust calories up or down again.

The reason you should wait a week is because your actual weight shown on a scale will go up or down a few pounds every day due to factors that are not actually related to true weight gain. For example, the amount of carbohydrate and sodium you consume one day to the next will impact how much water retention is going on in your body. That can cause a change of two pounds or more.

Be sure to weigh yourself around the same time each day. Also keep in mind that even the most expensive scales have an error margin of about plus or minus 2 pounds. That’s why it’s best to take an average of your daily weight across seven days and use that as an indicator of whether you are actually gaining or losing weight.

Make Calorie Counting More Convenient

At first, keeping track of your calories may feel difficult. That’s because you’re starting from scratch and you haven’t yet developed the ability to estimate calories yet. But in time, it goes much faster.

Even so, it can be time-consuming to keep track of everything you eat. You have to write everything down. You have to repeatedly stop to look up how many calories there are in the foods you eat.

Fortunately, we have a better solution for you. Count your calories in advance. Here’s how that works.

Manufacturers are required to put nutrition facts on packages, which makes it much easier to figure out what you’re eating. The exception is when you’re eating food you’ve cooked from scratch like potatoes, chicken, or homemade bread. I’ll explain how to deal with those types of ingredients in a minute. But first, let’s discuss the most important general principle.

Whether you are cooking from scratch or using packaged foods, you can count your calories a week in advance. You do that by dividing up the correct portions into single-serving containers that are ready to eat at a moment’s notice.

So for example, let’s say you want to have spaghetti with pasta sauce and ground beef mixed in. Look at the back of the box. How many calories are there per serving? And how many servings does it say the whole box contains? Multiply those two numbers to get the total calories in the box of spaghetti noodles.

Let’s say there are 800 calories in the whole box. But when you’re done cooking, you divide the spaghetti into four different bowls. If you split 800 four ways, it comes to 200 calories. So the spaghetti part of this meal is 200 calories.

You’ll use the same method to figure out how many calories you’re adding from spaghetti sauce and ground beef. Once each serving is in its own dish, freeze or refrigerate your meals. Write the total calories of the meal on a piece of masking tape and stick it on each container.

A key to making this simple and easy is having plenty of identical containers that are microwave safe and freezer safe. Microwave-safe just means it’s a container that won’t melt or release chemicals into your food when heated in the microwave. Glass containers with rubber or plastic lids are best for that.

Freezer safe just means a container that won’t crack or be too difficult to open after freezing. Sometimes plastic containers stick to frozen liquids and then crack when you’re trying to get the food out. Again, glass containers with rubber or plastic lids as shown in the image below will be your best option. Glass won’t release any toxic chemicals into your food when you microwave it.

The reason you want to have lots of the same kind of container is because it will save you time. It will stop you from having to search for the right lid.

It will also stop you from wasting time on things like transferring food from Tupperware into something that is microwave-safe when you are ready to warm it up. You can just pull it straight out of the freezer, pop it in the microwave, and your meal is ready to eat.

And the best part is you already know exactly how many calories are in it. Just grab some masking tape and write the calories on the tape that you then stick on the glass container.

Once you have a set of meals you’re used to making, you will no longer need to do this because you already remember how many calories are in each meal. But if you follow our plan completely, you won’t even have to think about those calories because it will all be planned out a week in advance. This reduces the stress of trying to decide whether you’ve eaten the right amount.

I recommend you use glass containers with well-fitting plastic lids.

What if you don’t want to use an entire box of spaghetti? How do you figure out the total calories in that situation? The easiest way is to use a food scale. A food scale lets you see exactly how many grams you are about to cook or eat. Then multiply that by the number of grams per calorie.

You don’t have to use a scale, but it’s much more accurate than trying to eyeball it. You can order a scale like this at Amazon.com. (Be sure to use the “tare” function to neutralize the weight of your container before adding the food you want to weigh.)

So how do you calculate the number of grams per calorie? It’s really easy. Look at the back of the box. Find the place where it tells you how many calories there are in one serving. Now divide that by the number of grams in one serving.

So it’s calories per serving divided by grams per serving. That tells you how many calories there are per gram of this particular food.

When looking at the back of a container of almonds, you can calculate the exact number of calories per almond. That way you’re not restricted to the “serving size” listed on the label.

You do that by first calculating the number of calories per gram. Let’s look at how to do this calculation with an example. Here is the nutrition label for some roasted almonds.

View attachment 34080 * picture won't get inserted :(
Here's Manual Nutrition facts..

Amount Per 1 cup whole kernels (138g)
Calories 821
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 72g 110%
Saturdated fat 6g 30%
Polyunsaturated fat 18g
Monounsaturated fat 45g
Trans fat 0g
Cholesterol 0 mg 0%
Sodium 4 mg 0%
Potassium 983 mg 28%
Total Carbohydrate 29g 9%
Dietary fiber 15g 60%
Sugar 7g
Protein 29g 58%
Vitamin A 0% Vitamin C 0%

Looking at the top of this label, we can see the nutrition information is based on one cup of almonds, which is 138 grams. It says there are 821 calories in that serving. So we divide calories per serving (821) by the number of grams in a serving (138).

821/138 = 6.02 calories per gram

So there are approximately 6 calories per gram of almonds. Let’s say you want to pack a 200 calorie snack. How many grams do you need? Well, since each gram has 6 calories, we just divide 200 by 6 to see how many grams it takes.

200/6 = 33.33

So to get 200 calories of almonds, you just pour some onto your food scale until it reaches 33 grams. Then you know you have 200 calories of almonds.

If you buy whole foods like raw chicken, carrots, or potatoes, there may not be any nutrition label. For those kinds of foods, you can easily look up the nutrition information online. The best website I have found for this purpose is calorieking.com. They also have an app if you use a smart phone.

Here’s the real key to making calorie counting easy. Prepare meals in advance.

Separate your meals into the right calorie proportions and plan a menu for the next seven days. This causes you to automatically eat the right number of calories without having to think about it the rest of the week when you’re busy.

Do all your cooking and meal preparation on one day each week. Choose whichever day works best for you. Then don’t think about it the rest of the week.

Here’s how to really speed things up. When you have a rotating list of high-protein, nutritious meals you eat on a regular basis, they start to take you less and less time to prepare. That’s because you develop systems that allow you to prepare those meals more quickly.

The first time you plan a new meal, it seems to take forever. But if you make the same set of meals over and over, it gets much faster.

You don’t have to think about which pan to use to cook it, because you’ve done it 10 times before. You don’t have to check the box to remember how long to cook it. Everything just gets faster when you have a go-to list of meals that repeats every week or two. If you want more variety, make your meals repeat every three weeks instead of every seven days. It just depends on how much variety you need to feel satisfied.

If you’d rather not mess with trying to figure out the best meals that fit our recommended nutrition plan, use a meal from the seven day meal plan we’ve designed for you.

A “good enough” Calorie Counting Shortcut

If calorie counting sounds too complicated to you, I’ve got good news. There’s a shortcut that works pretty well as a substitute. It’s not quite as good, but it’s “good enough.” You’ll get most of the benefits you would get from actual calorie counting.

It’s a method based on one simple idea. The idea is that if you eat enough protein, you will be getting the basic building blocks you need for muscle growth and you will be unlikely to overeat since protein is so filling.

Protein fills up your stomach a lot more than other foods. For example, 100 calories of baked chicken is much bigger and heavier than 100 calories of bread.

If you ate as much bread as you felt like eating, you would probably eat too many calories and start to get fat. But if you make sure every meal contains enough grams of protein, you will be unlikely to overeat. That’s because the protein will make you feel full.

You are unlikely to over eat carbs and fats if your meals are centered around getting enough protein. So you can just count the number of grams of protein and forget about measuring everything else. But there is one thing you do have to measure to make this shortcut work. You have to measure yourself.

The second part of this shortcut method is to weigh yourself every day.

Be consistent and weigh yourself each day. Also use a picture log (pictures of yourself) to make sure you are moving in the right direction for your current goal.

Here’s why this is important. If you’re not actually measuring the number of calories you’re eating, you might start to gain weight or lose weight when you did not mean to. But by measuring yourself and keeping a log with pictures, you get feedback that lets you adjust how much you eat.

For example, people with high metabolisms often don’t eat enough calories when on a high-protein diet. The protein makes them feel too full. So they eat fewer carbs and fats. As a result, their body does not get enough calories to trigger muscle building.

Weight gain can actually be just as difficult as weight loss when you have a very high metabolism. Eating healthy food when you’re not hungry is no fun. But if you’re serious about transforming a scrawny physique into a muscular one, it is necessary. So if you use this method, make sure you gain at least half a pound each week. If you’re not gaining any weight, force yourself to eat more.

If the scale shows you’re staying at the same weight, or losing weight, you’ll need to be more conscious about deliberately adding calories beyond your protein calories. We’ll talk about how to do that in the section titled Too Skinny below.

For those of you who have a bit of extra fat to lose, there’s one thing you might want to add to this basic shortcut method. You might want to also keep track of the total number of grams of carbohydrate you consume each day.

Try to keep your total carbs below 50 grams per day and you’ll be amazed how quickly you shed the fat. Eating high-protein and low-carb allows you to keep your muscles while burning off the fact. It creates the right environment for preserving muscle mass gains while you’re in your low calorie phase.
 
Breakfast:- 10 Boiled Whole eggs
-1 cup big oats without sugar

Lunch:- 1 pound of Ground beef cook in butter
-1 cup brown rice
-2 cup brocolli

Diner:-1 pound of Chicken Thighs
-1 cup brown rice
-2 cup brocolli
 
Breakfast:- 10 Boiled Whole eggs
-1 cup big oats without sugar

Lunch:- 1 pound of Ground beef cook in butter
-1 cup brown rice
-2 cup brocolli

Diner:-1 pound of Chicken Thighs
-1 cup brown rice
-2 cup brocolli

This Diet is worthless for an Ectomorph 😂😂
 
This Diet is worthless for an Ectomorph ����

Move less, Lay down when you can sit. Dont run. Move as slowly as possible.

Less calories expanditure, More muscle gainz.

If your working in Construction laying Bricks all day sure eat a shitload of carbs with it.
 
Move less, Lay down when you can sit. Dont run. Move as slowly as possible.

Less calories expanditure, More muscle gainz.

If your working in Construction laying Bricks all day sure eat a shitload of carbs with it.

Ca depend de ton corp:

-Ectomorph,
-Mesomorph,
-Endomorph.

😂😂💪👍
 
Nutrition is like a suit:

If you think one size fits all you are doing it wrong


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
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