The Ideal Diet to Gain Weight
What’s the ideal diet to gain weight?
It’s been a long time since anybody in the know would recommend the old fashioned buik up eating crap then diet down approach. It was a 2 steps forward 1 step back system that was unhealthy and inefficient and probably stemmed from the drug using bodybuilders that could get away with doing it and still make decent improvements.
The bulking/cutting approach is wrong for one main reason when you are around 10% bodyfat or less your body’s insulin sensitivity is improved. This means that your body will utilize the powerful hormone insulin more effectively to drive amino acids and other nutrients into the muscle cells to build new muscle.
Not to mention the fact that you look bigger and better the leaner you are. Also that if all you had to do was stay on a lean-mass gaining plan where you maintained or even decreased your bodyfat levels then your gains would be greater. This would be due to the fact you’re not taking weeks or months out to get rid of all that fat you put on bulking.
So if there is this amazing diet to gain weight where you can gain as much muscle as you would ‘bulking’ but without all the fat what is it and how does it work.
The main problem with the old fashioned bulking diet is far too much carbs. Without being too generalized as different people respond in different ways to carbs most people get fat because they eat too much carbs. It’s also been thought in the past that you needed a considerable excess of calories to gain muscle but that just isn’t so.
The key to gaining muscle while staying lean is to maintain a high protein intake and a healthy quantity of fats but keeps the times and amounts of carbs under close control.
What I’m talking about is 1-1.5g or protein per pound of bodyweight and 80-100g of fat a day. That’s the easy part.
For carbs it’s best to keeps these relatively low compared to the average western diet and eat only in the morning and around workout times.
This means the first meal of the day should be made up of carbs and protein (every meal should have an even dose of protein). Subsequent meals should mainly consist of protein and fat except the meal before and after working out which can be similar to breakfast and contain carbs and protein.
It’s best to avoid mixing fat and carbs in the same meal as they cause a greater insulin spike and you generally tend to consume too many calories. I know I mentioned earlier that insulin is a good thing but that is around a workout when you have stimulated the muscles to uptake nutrients. The rest of the time most of those nutrients will go to creating fat cells.
So how much total carbs should we eat. This depends on your individual body type as some people get fat very easily eating carbs and others can eat a box of doughnuts and never gain a pound of fat. It also depends on your goals:
Do you need to get leaner while gaining muscle? Then eat very few carb containing meals.
Are you interested in putting on as much muscle as possible even if small amounts of fat are gained? Then consume more carb containing meals but still avoid carbs in the evening.
In general a carb containing meal should have roughly 30-50g of carbs in it and these should of course be from healthy sources such as fruit and vegetables or at least wholemeal breads and pasta etc.
So there you have it a basic outline of the ideal diet to gain weight. What you need to do is experiment with it to find what works best for you but you will find that if you control your carbs in the manner described above you will gain muscle at a much faster rate and never have to worry about getting fat again.
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