If you want to build muscle, it’s important to know that your diet plays a huge role in the results you see from your gym workouts.
In particular, if you adapt your everyday diet in certain effective ways, you can see massive muscle gains at a much faster rate.
However, with all sorts of conflicting information out there, how do you know which muscle-building diet plan you should be aiming to follow?
In this guide, we aim to help you make the right choices in your diet to complement your workouts.
We’ll begin by explaining exactly why it’s worth your time to try lean muscle diets and explain the relationship between these diets and bodybuilding.
From there, we’ll move on to look at four of the very best muscle-building diet plans.
Finally, we’ll explain how we can help you get even more out of your healthy eating plan.
Lean muscle diets offer significant benefits for anyone who is trying to get in shape. Specifically, since muscle burns calories more effectively than fat, you can shed any excess weight more effectively if you work to build lean muscle.
However, such diets are often especially appealing to bodybuilders and those who are deliberately increasing their strength for any reason, as lean muscle meal plans are all about building up the strongest muscles you can, in the healthiest ways and at the fastest rate.
Before we pick out the best such diets, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of bodybuilding.
There are some foods that actively fight against the exercise you’re doing. In particular, foods with a high saturated fat content stop you from getting the most out of your workouts.
And if you consume lots of refined sugar, you get a very quick energy spike but an equally quick crash, reducing your endurance.
Plus, of course, refined sugar promotes unhealthy weight gain and may even increase your risk of certain conditions like type 2 diabetes.
In contrast, bodybuilding diets help to ensure that you get all the key nutrients you need. For example, every cell in your body – including the ones that make up your muscles – needs protein as a building block.
In addition, electrolytes easily get depleted as you lose them through sweat during exercise, and bodybuilding diets make sure you get those replenished and keep feeling good.
Now, let’s turn to four of the very best diet plans to follow if you want to see substantial muscle gains.
These well-known plans can all help you burn fat as well, especially when you’re at the gym working on your muscle-building techniques.
For each muscle-building diet, we’ll explain exactly how it works so you know how to choose the one that is likely to be right for your current goals.
You’ve almost certainly heard of it, but what is a keto diet?
Sometimes called a ketogenic diet, this approach involves consuming very few carbohydrates and focusing mostly on high fat intake.
Originally, people thought that keto muscle gain was impossible – or at least unlikely – due to the assumption that muscle growth requires a relatively high carb intake.
Actually, the keto diet can be a muscle-building one, depending on how you approach it.
The trick is to restrict carbohydrates enough to keep your body shedding fat stores and yet consume enough protein and heart-healthy fats to build muscle.
A calorie counter can help here.
The Atkins diet is another low-carbohydrate approach to your daily intake, so most people who start it do so in order to lose weight.
It focuses on protein and fat instead of carbs, and the trick is once again to balance these food groups enough that your body burns fat stores while nevertheless building muscle.
Expects to suggest that you need to consume less than 20 grams of carbs a day to stick to a diet like this, and to get the energy for your workouts from things like eggs, leafy greens, and nuts.
Slow-carb diets take a slightly different approach, but you can definitely build muscle while you follow one.
The classic slow-carb diet has five major rules:
The cheat day helps to ensure you have enough energy for your muscle-building workouts throughout the week, and you can vary your staple meals to ensure you’re getting the protein you need for energy and increased muscle mass.
Finally, a high-protein diet remains a favorite of those trying to build muscle.
On such an approach, there are no difficult limitations and no rules to remember.
You keep your diet simple, focusing on protein as a source of cell growth, and you quickly begin to bulk up.
Some of the key foods to focus on include seafood, lean meat, and nuts.
Meanwhile, it’s smart to reduce your carbohydrate intake, cutting down on foods like pasta and bread.
In a certain sense, this diet has important similarities to the ones above, but it’s alterable and less restrictive.
As you’ve seen, there are plenty of diets you can adopt if you want to maximize your success at the gym and build as much muscle as possible.
All of the above can work well – which one you choose it’s a matter of taste and lifestyle.
However, most of us have busy lives, and it can be annoying to have to track all your food in your head and keep coming up with new ideas for meals.
That’s where we come in!
At HealthyEating.com, we can generate a diet plan that’s perfectly tailored to your needs.
We’ll give you more recipes than you could need, help you count your calories, and even produce a shopping list for you once you choose your meals.
