As a food delivery company, whose primary aim is to supply delicious meals to cater to people’s exercise goals, we’re constantly asked questions like, what are the best foods for building muscle, what‘s the best muscle building diet or what are the muscle meals?
Before we start, let’s go over some of the basics. Food has 3 purposes; Fuel, repair and enjoyment. In the first instance, the food we eat fuels our bodies. The food contains macronutrients in the form of fat, protein & carbohydrate and our bodies convert these large molecules into various forms of usable fuel. And that’s an important step right there – our body doesn’t use these large molecules, it breaks them right down into much smaller, useable, compounds.
Secondly, we eat for repair. Let’s assume you’re doing everything right in the gym – essentially you’re creating a scenario where your body needs the macronutrients in the food to repair & grow.
Thirdly, enjoyment. There’s absolutely no need to exclude any food from your diet as long as you’re aware of its calorific (energy) value. Nick Cheadle, one of our ambassadors, has written many great articles on flexible dieting and is a big advocate of including any foods that you love.
So what are the muscle meals? The ones that fuel your workout...? The ones that help you repair...or the ones that include pizza?
Building muscle – assuming you’re training right – happens when you’re eating more energy than you’re using. So, if you maintain your bodyweight on 2500 calories per day and you want to gain muscle, and therefore gain weight, try increasing your calories to 3000 per day. It’s the extra 500 calories that are important and not necessarily the food group they come from. That said, it is widely regarded that people looking to gain muscle, support their efforts with around 1g of protein intake per day for every 0.5kg of bodyweight.
So, for an average 80kg male, looking to increase their muscle size, eating around 160g – 180g of protein per day is considered optimal. Whether those 160 grams of protein come from shakes, meat, eggs, fish or protein pancakes isn’t really going to make a huge difference at all. What will make the difference is being consistently over your average daily energy requirements.
The difficult thing, of course, is tracking your energy intake. This is where we come in. All of our meals are macro-calculated making it easy to manage your daily intake whether that be for building muscle or losing weight, it’s easy to track your progress when you know precisely what you’re eating.
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