Eat to Grow Muscle: Choosing Foods for Muscle Growth

Written by JT on March 10, 2009 – 10:25 pm -

It's hard to argue with the idea that you need to eat enough of the right kinds of food if you want to grow muscle. But what are the right foods for muscle growth? With all the misleading information and fad eating plans out there, that's a trickier question. Fortunately, there are some basic facts that help clear things up. Keep reading for the straight information you need if you're going to pick foods to grow muscle.

Muscle Growth Requires You to Eat

You know you have to work hard to stimulate your body to build muscle. Well the actual act of building muscle is hard work too. Your body has to burn a lot of energy when it builds new muscle. That means you may well have to eat more than you are now to give your body the calories it needs to build bigger muscles.

But that isn't a license to stuff your face all day. Stuffing yourself with jelly donuts or other junk foods will increase the number of calories you get, but that's not going to help your body build big muscles. You still need to eat healthy foods for muscle growth or you'll just get fat instead of more muscular. That's where the rest of this article comes in.

Protein is Your Top Priority

When you work out hard enough to build new muscles, you're in reality damaging the muscles that you want to make bigger. Your body responds to the damage by repairing the damage and at the same time rebuilding the muscles a little bigger and stronger to handle the stress. And protein is the construction material your body uses for this rebuilding job. If you don't eat enough protein, your body will run out of raw materials and won't be able to make the muscle stronger or even repair the damage you do working out. You'll fail to make your muscles bigger. In fact, over time, they'll get weaker instead of stronger and you'll probably end up injuring yourself.

So getting enough high-quality protein is your top priority. The best sources of protein are chicken (particularly the breast), turkey, and fish. You need to make sure that your diet includes plenty of these three high-protein foods. Lean red meats, eggs, and nuts are also useful sources of protein, but you should get most of it from turkey, chicken, and fish.

Carbs Are Your Workout Energy Source

Carbs are your body's main fuel. If you don't eat enough carbs, you won't have the energy to work out long enough or hard enough to build muscle. And even if you somehow manage to pull off the workouts, without enough carbohydrates, your body won't have the energy to rebuild your muscles stronger.

Not all carbohydrates are the same though. Simple carbohydrates, like bread or table sugar, give you a quick jolt of energy followed by a crash, while at the same time giving you a bunch of empty calories that your body is very likely to store as fat. Complex carbohydrates like whole grain breads, fruits, and vegetables give you a slower, but longer lasting supply of energy, contain lots of nutrients with their calories, and are much less likely to end up as fat. Eat lots of complex carbs, eliminate simple carbs from your diet as best you can, you'll find that you have the energy you need for muscle growth.

Fat is Not all Bad

While the experts seem to argue against eating any kind of fat, you do need to eat some fat to be healthy. Fat is another energy source and building block of your body. The biggest problem with fat is that we get too much of the wrong kinds of fat. The kind of fat we get too much of is the kind of fat you see around the edges of a steak, or the kind that's in heavily processed foods like margarine. Fish and nuts can provide you with the Omega-3 healthy fats that most people don't get enough of. You can greatly improve the quantity and quality of fats in your diet if you trim the excess fat from meats, don't eat the skins of your chicken and turkey, and include lots of fish and some nuts in your diet, you'll be all set.

Are You Ready to Take it Further?

And that, my friend, is the right information to select foods that will help you to build muscle. As you read this, you saw saw several things you could apply to your diet to make it more more effective for building lean muscle fast. Make the changes and see if you don't notice some real progress.

With that said, while all this information will surely help, its really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to foods for building muscle. And we haven't even touched on ways to make your diet work with specific workouts. For that kind of information, you will want to get yourself a complete muscle building plan. The most complete plans cover food as well as giving you tried and true workouts to do.

To learn about good muscle building foods and read reviews of the effective muscle building plans, visit http://GetFitAtLast.com

 

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