Geschatte leestijd: 9 minutenGetting enough nutrition for muscle mass can be difficult, especially for picky eaters. Here you will find tips to make this easier.
Nutrition for muscle mass
Knowing what to eat and actually doing it are two different things. You read an article in a bodybuilding magazine about nutrition plans to gain muscle mass and resolve to bulk up in the coming weeks. The first morning you wake up at 6 AM to go to work, fifteen minutes earlier than usual because you have to cook 8 proteins. Then you sit with your brown bread and proteins in front of you and can’t eat a bite.
A recognizable scenario for many picky eaters. Especially ectomorphs, people who naturally do not gain weight easily, often struggle to eat the necessary amounts of food to build muscle mass. To gain muscle mass, you need to consider three important points regarding nutrition:
- The right (amount of) nutrients.
- When to eat which nutrients.
- Choosing a diet plan you can stick to.
I will discuss the first two points in detail in the articles about nutrition in general and bulking. As nutrition tips for muscle mass, I describe which meals contain the right nutrients, but especially which are easy to make and eat. Since it is currently popular to talk about the crisis, I will also take your wallet into account.
Drinking is easier than eating
Therefore, make your nutrition drinkable. If you serve me a bowl of warm porridge at 6 AM, more of it will end up coming out of me than going in because the thought of having to eat it at that moment makes me nauseous. Maybe a bit exaggerated, but there are moments when you need certain nutrients while you have absolutely no appetite for them.
Brinta and Breakfast Cereals
The same amount of Brinta or breakfast cereals with milk, even more, I still manage to consume every morning before 6 AM. How? By not heating it into a thick porridge that I have to spoon in, but by simply drinking it cold. Take a shaker, add 500ml of semi-skimmed milk, and then add the Brinta. Stir it, so you don’t even have to look for the matching lid of the shaker, and presto! You can drink this in a minute.
The trick is to find the right ratio so you can add as much Brinta to your milk as possible without it becoming too thick to drink. If it does become too thick (usually when you’ve left it sitting for a while), just add some more milk and stir again. I say Brinta, but I briefly switched to “Wholegrain cereal breakfast,” the C1000 store brand. I started this one day because the C1000 was out of Brinta and I saw their store brand on the shelf next to it. I immediately wondered why I hadn’t done this before.
The store brand has almost the same nutritional values, slightly fewer carbohydrates, but also slightly more protein. However, the price is about 30% less. The taste is comparable, although the texture is more fluid, making it even easier to drink. Because it becomes thick less quickly and thus remains drinkable for longer, you can put more in it than is the case with Brinta. With 500ml of milk, I add 70 grams of “Wholegrain cereal breakfast” while with Brinta, 50 grams is about the max. This also depends on how quickly you drink it. Unfortunately, “my” C1000 has since turned into a Jumbo that does not have a comparable or better store brand.
Many people make it with water instead of milk. This is a matter of taste, training objectives, and possibly other reasons for not consuming dairy. To gain muscle mass, it is advisable to drink it with milk for the extra protein and fats.
Quark
I also struggled to consume quark and could spend hours over a small bowl of it. Not practical if you want to eat this every night before going to bed (before sleeping, you want protein, but usually not carbohydrates and fat). Here too, the same solution applies. Make it drinkable. Another advantage is that this sour low-fat quark can be easily made tastier (less sour) in this way. It tastes a bit like buttermilk. Put 300ml of milk in your shaker. Add 250g of low-fat quark. You don’t even need to measure it precisely because it is usually sold in 500g packs, so you just scoop out half. In this case, shaking works better than stirring, so put the lid on and shake. Also in this case, I get the same nutrients (plus a bit from the milk), but much faster and easier.
Noodles, quick warm carbohydrates
The same applies to a third easy meal to get your carbohydrates: Noodles. Noodles, contain a lot of carbohydrates and fats (35 and 14 grams per portion, respectively) and can be prepared in a few minutes. They are sold in single-serve packets, are easy to take to work, and are cheap if you don’t go for the expensive brands. For 37 cents, you’ve got your lunch’s carbohydrates and fats covered, and all you need is boiling water. There are different brands, but YumYum noodles are the cheapest and available in most supermarkets. The taste may take some getting used to. I always thought it smelled bad when my son made them, but that’s mainly the spices that go through it, and you’ll get used to those unless you find them tasty right away. You can choose whether to leave the water in and drink it as soup or drain it to eat as pasta.
I find it easy to make a large pan of chicken breast and stir-fry vegetables in a tasty sauce (for those who have never seen the inside of a kitchen, for example, a mix of sweet and sour sauce, ginger syrup, and soy sauce) and then freeze it in containers. Every day, I take out a container to warm up at lunch and toss it with the drained noodles. This adds the necessary protein, vitamins, and minerals, but is especially delicious!
“Peanut butter, that makes you big and strong”
To gain muscle mass, you need to eat the right ratio of carbohydrates, protein, and (the right) fats. Interestingly, the latter are often a problem in bodybuilders’ diets because foods that are rich in protein and carbohydrates often contain little fat, but also because fats are wrongly banned too much from the diet. An easy source of good fats is peanut butter.
Especially if you get a lot of your food from drinkable sources because you can easily mix a scoop of peanut butter into it. With one tablespoon of peanut butter (about 15 grams), you add, depending on the brand, about 9 grams of mainly unsaturated fats. Cold Brinta and quark shakes both contain very little fat. You can easily add one or several tablespoons of peanut butter to meet your daily fat needs.
Buy in bulk
If you finally have something that you can easily consume every morning, you’ll quickly notice how quickly it runs out. You’ll be quite disappointed when you want to make your Brinta and cereal in the morning and only see two drops of milk fall out of the carton when you were counting on half a liter. The advantage of Brinta and cereal is that they have a long shelf life. So, buy multiple packs at once. That’s why I’ve been drinking long-life milk for years. Many people don’t like this, but you get used to it (just like cold Brinta and drinkable quark). This way, you can buy 12 packs in a box and be ready for 2 weeks.
And what about supplements?
Supplements remain a very easy way to get the right nutrients. They are easy because you can weigh the exact nutritional values and because you can easily throw them into a shake. More importantly: because the nutrients are filtered from certain products, you need much less food in terms of quantity to get the same amount of nutrients. Creatine is an exception to this, as you often cannot get enough of it from your daily diet.
Carbohydrates
As for carbohydrates, supplements are not necessary when it comes to getting enough daily intake. They are easy to obtain from food, including with the tips given here. However, sometimes it may not be easy enough. Personally, I find products like fine oats and rice powder handy to have in the kitchen as sources of slow carbohydrates. Purely for convenience, again because drinking is easier than eating.
Another difference with carbohydrates in normal food is the speed at which they are absorbed and can do their work. Sometimes a supplement with fast carbohydrates like dextrose, waxy maize starch (same raw material as Vitargo), or maltodextrin, for during or after training, can be useful. Many, for example, are enthusiastic about the fast action of Vitargo. Personally, I find it very expensive compared to, for example, the slower dextrose, waxy maize starch, or maltodextrin (€37.40 for Vitargo compared to €5 for others). However, the added value in terms of faster absorption has been demonstrated in studies (1). However, you don’t need them daily to meet your total carbohydrate needs, although it does make it easier.
Protein
As for protein, it’s a different story. Here you have two differences compared to protein from food: the amount you get and the speed at which they are processed in the body.
For strength training, most researchers recommend eating between 1.6 and 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (2-5). However, to build muscle mass, most bodybuilders eat between 2 and 3 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (Tipton). So if, for example, you weigh 80kg, you end up with 160 to 240 grams of protein per day. That’s 20 to 30 grams of protein per meal with eight meals a day. That translates to, for example, 2.5 to 3.75 eggs.
Another easier alternative is the quark shake, which is also included in the schedule. With half a pack of skimmed quark, you get around 32 grams. Mixed with milk, it’s even higher. The “problem” here has to do with the second difference between supplements and normal food: when and which protein you consume can be just as important as the total amount of protein you consume daily (6).
In the morning and after training, it’s wise to have fast protein at least (for muscle building), possibly mixed with slow protein (to limit muscle breakdown) (7,8). Quark consists mainly of slow proteins. Milk also consists of 80% slow proteins (casein) and only 20% fast protein (whey). So if you want to get 20 grams or more of whey, you would have to eat a lot and possibly get a lot of other substances that don’t necessarily fit into your diet. Measuring out 20 grams with a measuring spoon and throwing it into your shake is much easier.
So, there’s nothing wrong with starting the day and ending the training with a whey shake to get (fast) protein as quickly as possible and ending the day with a mix of proteins or just slow (casein) to provide protein during sleep.
MCT Oil and Fats
To incorporate the necessary unsaturated fats into the diet, I (regarding wounded nutrition) have chosen peanut butter because it is an easy and very healthy source of fats.
Even easier is MCT oil, oil based on medium-chain triglycerides (see article). These fats provide almost as many calories as LCT fats (8.3 kcal per gram instead of 9), long-chain triglycerides, but they are much less likely to lead to fat storage and also increase body fat burning. Taking two tablespoons (60 grams) twice a day provides almost 500 kcal! In my case, that’s already half of all the calories that need to come from fats. The bottle pictured next to this is the one I usually buy myself because of the sharp price and quality of Neobee (also often used by researchers). However, there are various suppliers.
An alternative to this could be fish oil. Similar in the sense that they are easy fats. Available as a supplement as Omega-3. Easy to take as capsules and very healthy for various reasons.
You can read this article with the aim of getting everything from natural food and achieving excellent results. Easier and better is to combine both. It is indeed a pitfall to drink only protein shakes and/or weight gainer all day long and forget that this is supplementation, supplement, and not a replacement. Price may be a concern for some, but if you calculate it per meal and compare it with alternatives, the costs are reasonable.
Do I Eat the Same Every Day?
For the most part, yes. The whole advantage of schedules like these is similar to the advantage of a school uniform. You don’t have to think every day about what to wear only to find out that half of it is in the laundry. The big advantage is that you walk into the kitchen and know what you’re going to eat and that it fits into your diet.
It’s quite difficult if you have to figure out where to get your protein from at 6 in the morning. You should mainly look for variation in dinner. Firstly, there is often more time to cook then. Secondly, you need to build in variation because otherwise, you risk consistently lacking certain nutrients (especially vitamins and minerals). Thirdly, it’s nice if you have a family and not everyone has to eat rice with chicken every day just because you want to be muscular.
Finally, this diet plan is designed to be easy. If you know alternatives that are just as easy and have the right nutritional value or if you are sometimes willing to make a little more effort, then you should definitely do that!
Download the Diet Plan Generator!
Recently, you can download the Fitsociety app. We have created this to make it possible for everyone to easily create a personal diet plan that takes into account all the important variables. Moreover, the file contains almost 30,000 products with nutritional values to choose from! So, you don’t have to look up anything. This has been downloaded more than 50,000 times in a short time.
“What the farmer doesn’t know, he doesn’t grow from.”
Kenneth Nwosu
References
- La Bounty. The effects of a starch-based carbohydrate alone or in combination with whey protein on a subsequent bout of exercise performance – preliminary findings. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2009; 6(Suppl 1): P13. Published online 2009 July 31.
- Lemon P. Effects of exercise on dietary protein requirements. Int J Sport Nutr. 1998;8:426–447. Joint Position Statement: nutrition and athletic performance. American College of Sports Medicine, American Dietetic Association, and Dietitians of Canada. Med Sci Sports Exerc 2000, 32(12):2130-2145.
- Lemon PW: Protein and amino acid needs of the strength athlete. Int J Sport Nutr 1991, (2):127-145.
- Tarnopolsky MA, Atkinson SA, MacDougall JD, Chesley A, Phillips S, Schwarcz HP: Evaluation of protein requirements for trained strength athletes. J Appl Physiol 1992, 73(5):1986-1995.
- Antonio J, Stout JR: Sports Supplements. Philadelphia, PA , Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2001.
- Tipton KD, Wolfe RR. Protein and amino acids for athletes. J Sports Sci. 2004 Jan;22(1):65-79.
- YVES BOIRIE, MARTIAL DANGIN, PIERRE GACHON, MARIE-PAULE VASSON, JEAN-LOUIS MAUBOIS, AND BERNARD BEAUFRERE. Slow and fast dietary proteins differently modulate postprandial protein accretion. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. Vol. 94, pp. 14930–14935, December 1997. Physiology
- Dangin M, Boirie Y, Garcia-Rodenas C, Gachon P, Fauquant J, Callier P, Ballèvre O, Beaufrère B. The digestion rate of protein is an independent regulating factor of postprandial protein retention. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2001 Feb;280(2):E340-8.
