When it comes to gaining muscle, the gym is the first thing that comes to mind. Swinging weights around, pushing those muscle fibers to their absolute max and hitting new personal records. That’s how we grow muscle right?
Well in part. But it’s only one piece. In truth what you are feeding your body the rest of the day is just as if not more important that what you do inside the gym.
Think about it this way; we go to the gym, spend maybe an hour getting our sweat on, then leave and go about our day right? But food isn’t so simple is it?
We have three meals a day, snacks, food staring at us in the break room, fast food signs glaring at us as we drive down the road. Advertisements for pizza loaded with bubbling cheese. It’s everywhere, and because of that, it’s much harder to stay on track with our food.
When I started off in fitness I was told over and over: “just eat more food”. So I did. I ate more ice cream, more pizza, more hamburgers, more oreos, more soda. Guess what happened? NOTHING.
That’s right I still stayed super skinny. Now before you get angry and tell yourself that you wish you could eat all that and stay skinny, I was beyond skinny. I weighed 118 pounds, lacked confidence, lacked self-esteem, and it was not a good place to be.
What I later discovered is that while how much you eat definitely plays a role, so does WHAT you eat. The empty calories I had been eating were going in my body, but my body couldn’t do anything with those calories. Those calories couldn’t be put to work to build muscle.
Once I started eating good healthy foods that actually fueled and nourished my body, I started seeing changes and results from all my hard work.
Sure it took time and nothing good happens over night, but I could start to see forward progress.
Check out the video below to see everything I eat in a day (currently at least; I try to change it up pretty frequently).