My Ultimate Bodybuilding Meal Plan
You can pump as hard as you like, and for as long as you like. You can take as many SARMs and other supplements as you like. But unless you back it all up with a great diet, then you simply won’t get the gains you want, you won’t cut the fat you need, and you won’t have the energy to maximize your recovery either.
In order to get the maximum gains and get the look you want, you have to see this as a lifestyle rather than something you just do it now and again. That’s why want to talk to you today about my ultimate bodybuilding meal plan.
Alongside hard work and sensible supplement use, it’s perfect for helping you to get the most out of your body, and the effort you put in.
So what I’m going to do here in this article is explain to you exactly what you should be eating, and what you shouldn’t be eating. I’ll also give you are a few pointers on my daily diet, and talk to you about the things you should also be avoiding.
The Basics Of Diet And Bodybuilding
Let’s be honest, the main goal is to develop yourself a well-balanced and muscular physique, right?
You want to have as little fat as possible, and be as toned as possible. You just want to look good, both yourself, and others.
The problem is that that then put your focus on working out harder to build muscle, and also stripping fat.
It often comes at the cost of totally ignoring diet, or just nodding to a good diet, and sometimes also ignoring cardio, which is brilliant for fat burning and underlying physical and mental well-being.
Generally, you’re looking at two phases, cutting and bulking. You will cut initially, to get rid of the fact, then bulk, then little more cutting, then bulking again. Once you reach level you want, it’s generally a maintenance between the two phases.
When you’re bulking, it’s high-calorie, protein rich, and accompanies the use of potent anabolic SARMs with heavy workouts.
When you’re cutting, you’re looking more reps, burning calories, maintenance, and stripping calories by eating a nutritious but almost fat and carbohydrate free diet.
How Many Calories Should You Be Taking On Board Every Day?
The question around how many calories you need during each phase of bodybuilding is a bit of $1 million question one.
You could use a tracking app to look at the calories you are eating, and that will help you to judge what you really need to eat to hit the goals you want either in terms of bulking or cutting.
The main thing to remember is that if you are cutting then you need to finish each day in a calorie deficit. With bulking, it’s the opposite. For maintenance, you want to balance out.
During the bulking phase, you need to eat significantly more, up to 20% more than your maintenance calorie rate. So if you are consuming 3000 Cal a day, then you’re looking at consuming nearly 3500, and maybe up to 4000 on some individual days when you are pushing yourself really hard.
During a cutting phase, the same applies, if 3000 call per day as maintenance, you’re looking at 20% less, and cutting down on the heavy lifting, and focusing more on cardio and reps.
What Ratio Of Macronutrients Should You Be Working To?
Macronutrients are the three food groups, namely, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Now you understand how many calories you should be using in bulking, cutting, and maintenance phases, you can then work out the balance of those calories.
As a rough guide, around 30% of your calories should be protein, 50% carbohydrates, and up to 20% fat.
However, when I’m cutting, I will still try and take 10% off at fat total and put into proteins. When I’m bulking, 10% of the fat and carbohydrate each, meaning I’m hitting 50% of my calories as proteins.
You may find that too much, and it will be trial and error through your first bulking and cutting cycles.
What’s important to understand is that not only should your calorie intake change, but also you can target it more through changing your macronutrient ratio, although many people simply keep the recommended normal balance between the three groups, and just alter the calories. Again, you have to find what works for you.
These Are The Foods You Should Be Focusing On
For me, it’s important to get across to you that your diet and heart health is just as important as the bodybuilding, the weights, that you do.
It’s not just about the amount of training and how heavy, it’s about fueling that work to make better progress.
I’ve literally seen videos on YouTube of guys sitting in fast food restaurants after a workout stuffing 10,000 Cal of burgers and chips, fried chicken, you name it, just to get huge amounts of calories into them.
That shows two things. Firstly a completely irresponsible bravado that they are passing on to susceptible people. It’s just wrong.
Secondly, they just haven’t planned. They should never be in that sort of situation. What they are doing is literally cramming any calories they can into their bodies, smashing a load of SARMs, and basically having huge muscles, but being healthy on the inside.
So let’s now look at the foods you should be eating, then you can plan your diet far more easily.
Meat protein:
Lots of poultry and fish, lean steak, tenderloin pork, chicken breast, plenty of salmon and cod.
Dairy:
Yoghurts in moderation, no cheese, but plenty of cottage cheese, and low-fat milk.
Grains:
Don’t eat a lot of bread, but eat cereals, oatmeal, quinoa, wholegrain rice, and even unsweetened popcorn.
Fruits:
Oranges, apples, grapes, bananas, peaches, watermelon, and plenty of berries, especially blueberries.
Vegetables:
Broccoli, leafy salad greens, spinach, tomatoes, cucumber, asparagus, peppers, and mushrooms.
Seeds & nuts:
Walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds.
Beans & legumes:
Lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans, basically any type of bean even baked beans as long as there’s not too much sugar.
Cut These Out To Skyrocket Your Bodybuilding Efforts
As well as understanding all the things you should eat, you also have to know about all the things you shouldn’t eat (and drink).
Alcohol is the crucial one here. Not only does it make you feel awful, and increase levels of anxiety over time, but it also packs in hidden calories. It can also make you lazier, and overall significantly impacts the ability to build muscle and lose fat, as well as remain motivated.
Sugar is another thing to avoid. Sugar is calories, and it stuff the body burns quickly, and then demands more of. For me, just cut it out. Go cold turkey, and remove sugar from your diet world entirely.
Also, avoid fried foods. Fried foods can induce inflammation in the body, and are closely linked with several major diseases, including cancer. There are huge amounts of calories hidden in fried foods, which is why I’m astonished that bodybuilders stuff so much of it, especially when you factor in the amount of salt and bad fat.
Back Things Up With Bodybuilding Supplements
Before I move on here, I want to talk about bodybuilding supplements. A lot of guys use them, and I would certainly suggest you do.
They will allow you to achieve more than you can naturally. Whether it’s burning fat, building strength and endurance, heightening your motivation, or help your muscles to grow harder and faster, supplements both natural and artificial can really help.
In terms of natural bodybuilding supplements, we are looking at legal steroid alternatives, and natural things that can help you to achieve more.
In terms of individual things, you could use D-Aspartic Acid to promote improved levels of testosterone. You could also use Mucuna Pruriens, which has been proven to promote high levels of dopamine (our motivation/risk and reward hormone).
The best way of doing natural supplements is to get a bundled one. CrazyBulk do some very good ones, and I’ve used them regularly. They have packed together natural ingredients that have proven to either help you bulk, burn more fat, build motivation, and heighten your levels of testosterone. If you stack them, you’ll get the benefits of all of them, without any detrimental side effects.
An alternative is SARMs. I want you to note that I regularly use SARMs and natural bodybuilding supplements at the same time, there’s nothing to stop you, you just pile up the benefits.
You can stack SARMs, or use them individually. Individually, SARMs can build muscle, burn fat, increase motivation, and shorten recovery times. Sometimes, they can do more than one of those things.
The power of SARMs, just like natural bodybuilding supplements, is in the stack though.
A powerful SARMs stack to bulk up, cut fat, or an all-round maintenance stack, alongside the superb diet and exercise regime I’m advocating in this article, can really take your bodybuilding to the next level.
Sample One Day Bodybuilding Menu
I’m not going to bore you, or spoon-feed you (excuse the pun), by giving you a complete weekly bodybuilding menu.
For a start, it’s a waste of typing because everybody is different. We all have different tastes, in every aspect of life.
There are also tons of these menus out there online, you can simply pick and choose to create your own.
Then, through trial and error, you can adjust the quantities and types, tracking your calorie intake, balancing your macronutrient percentages, until you get the perfect diet for the phase you are in (cutting/bulking/maintenance).
Just to give you an idea on balance, each day you should have a good amount of protein, especially when you are bulking. Each meal should contain a minimum of 30 g of protein during a bulking phase.
But just to give you an idea, here is a one day bodybuilding menu from the list I’d pick from when I am starting a cutting regime.
- Breakfast: scrambled eggs with oatmeal and mushrooms
- Mid-morning snack: Greek yoghurt and almonds
- Lunch: turkey breast with Basmati rice and mushrooms
- Mid-afternoon snack: protein shake and two pieces of fruit
- Dinner: mackerel and brown rice with a green salad
Portion control is very important, but you can see what’s going on here. Very little fat, no salt, no sugar, and a very controlled amount of carbohydrates as well.
You’re going to be hungry, but you are going to be minimizing that hunger, and maximizing the nutritional value of every mouthful you eat.
A Good Bodybuilding Diet Is Not All You Need To Do
I think it’s vital to start my conclusion here by telling you that bodybuilding has to be a lifestyle choice for you. It’s not something you can dip in and out of and expect results from.
What I’m seeing is an increasing amount of people out there who do this. They try and make up for it by pumping their bodies full of supplements and SARMs, and when they are bulking, just hammering the calories.
The problem is that they build huge muscles, but those muscles aren’t very toned, and they have huge amounts of body fat to then get rid of.
Because cutting is tough, they don’t do it correctly, and they keep on bulking even when they are trying to cut. It just doesn’t work.
I’ll also say that you can go too far the other way as well. Low levels of body fat can impact on your health as well. It can affect your sleep, mood, and energy levels. It’s no surprise that people who struggle with eating disorders and continually minimize their body fat also tend to have depression.
That’s the same at the other end of the spectrum though, and people with high percentages of body fat, even where it’s not visibly obese, also tend to have higher levels of depression, linked to low levels of motivation.
Also, having too much, or too little body fat, can weaken the immune system, and your ability to think clearly.
So as with everything, it has to be a lifestyle choice that achieves balance. You have to be able to cut, and bulk, you have to give your body the right things, and do it right. Then you can enhance things with supplements and SARMs.
But don’t fall into the trap that many bodybuilders do the thinking that it’s the SARMs and supplements that can help them to achieve the photos and videos they see. It’s part of it, but the people who are really getting to the levels you want, are definitely using the right diet and exercise regimes.
So at the start of your journey, get your diet right. Make sure it spot on, and experiment. You can start doing that even before you really hit the gym. Do it for a couple of months, get things sorted so they become automatic and natural.
Then do a cutting phase, then a bulking phase, just using diet and the gym. See what results you get.
After that, you’ll have the expertise, and the understanding of how your body works, to know which supplements to start using. I probably advocate you then only use natural bodybuilding supplements so that you understand what they can truly achieve.
Then, after that part of the journey is all over, probably after about six months, you can try SARMs. Perhaps individually, then in in a cutting stack, then a bulking stack, over 6 to 12 months, to truly understand how they work.
If you want to get a long-term body and mind that looks brilliant and is healthy, you need to devote a year to preparing the way. You cannot just hit the gym and start hammering yourself with supplements; you are not going to get the best results.
And at the heart of all of it is good diet. I’ve touched on many topics in this piece, but you need to go away and research a lot more, build your own bodybuilding plan, and experiment to understand what you need to fuel your body with.
I’ll also say that aerobic exercise is crucial to your success. Aerobic exercise, cardio work as well, will build overall body strength, and heart strength. It will improve vascularity generally, and heighten your ability to work out harder and longer in the gym. On top of that, it will give you a long-term healthy body on the inside, so that you can then build that great look on the outside.
Don’t fall into the trap of judging your body and success on your muscles and leanness alone.
Think of it as a car. If you spend all your money and time keeping the outside pristine, constantly buying new tires, polishing the car, keeping it spotlessly clean, spending money on removing rust and chips, getting it professionally valeted every month, it’s going to look fantastic.
But after a few years of the engine getting total neglect, what is going to happen to the engine?
Exactly. It will keep going, but it will continue to degrade performance. You will eventually have a car that looks fantastic for its age, but is falling to pieces in terms of the mechanics that keep it going.