Firstly: I am 18 and 5’10 200lbs, i reckon i am about 18% BF. Here is a pic as relaxed as i can find and some recent back poses with one front double bi, unfortuntley the photos cut off at the wrong point as it hides my fat which i carry in my love handles and lower ab region:
My old diet had no structure so I have tried to come up with a diet that would be good for gaining lean mass as i want to slowly build muscle and lose a bit of fat at the same time. I know it is most probably wrong, so some pointers would be great . 2 hour spacings between meals.
Meal 1: 4 Egg Whites, 25g whey protein shake with 300ml semi skimmed milk, 100g oats
Meal 2: 150g of Chicken breast and 125 g brown rice
Meal 3: 150g of Chicken breast and 125 g brown rice + Creatine shake
WORKOUT 2pm -3pm
Post Workout meal 3pm: 4 Caramel rice cakes, Banana and 50gm Whey Protein shake with 300ml semi skimmed milk
Meal 4: 130g Tuna and 125 g brown rice
Meal 5: 150g of Chicken breast and 100g of greens
Meal 6: 100g Cottage Cheese, 25g whey protein shake
Bed time shake: 25g whey protein shake with 300ml semi skimmed milk
#1) There’s almost no fat in your diet at all… big problem. To paraphrase Chris Shugart, there are no essential carbs, but there are essential fats.
#2) Too many carbs in the day. Your muscles are most sensitive to insulin after exercise. I don’t completely eliminate carbs in the AM and eat in the protein/fat or protein/carb pattern, but I do save most of my carbs for workout time and post workout meals. The point is, I like some carbs to get me going in the morning, but 250g of brown rice and 100g of oats is just plain excessive for just general carbs prior to a workout.
#3) Put #1 and #2 together. Meal 2 and 3 you can drop the rice, add veg and healthy fats.
#4) Your post workout shake, while better than no meal, is hardly optimal. Bananas aren’t a good post-workout goto because they are primarily composed of sucrose and fructose. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose (half of what we want, half of what we don’t want). While fructose is the sweetest sugar, it does not spike insulin and it not rapidly taken up by the muscles because it must be processed in the liver before fit for consumption by the muscles. Whey + a carb powder like dextrose or maltodextrin is fine.
So, if you really want to lean up and put on some muscle, drop the preworkout carbs for sure and add some fat. Grab a fishoil supplement, buy a bottle of olive oil. Take a preworkout shake to get primed for the gym (i like accelerade), workout, take a post workout shake (i like Surge). If you want to make your own buy a tub of maltodextrin and whey, mix in a ~3:1 ratio for both pre and postworkout shakes. 20g carb 7g protein is plenty for the preworkout, 50g 15g for the postworkout. Be aware that maltodextrin is a lot denser than protein, so 50g of malto will take up a lot less space than 50g of whey.
Be aware that losing fat while building muscle is something of an oxymoron for a natural builder of your size. I’d recommend taking a more direct approach to cutting like V-Diet or UD2, get down to a lower% bf, then go back to a bulk on an amended diet as mentioned. Get ripped first before continuing to work on muscle building, simply because partitioning is better in leaner people.
Thanks for the reply man. That was really in depth and helpful.
Just one more thing. You say drop the rice, add veg and healthy fats for 2 and 3. Any ideas on what i could use (veg and healthy fat wise) to keep the calories the same roughly? I was thinking flax seed oil.
Eat green vegetables. Avoid carby stuff like corn. Spinach & broccoli should be your go-to vegetable when in doubt.
Flax seed oil is kinda crap, to be honest; it tastes bad, doesn’t have the same omega-3 power as fish oil, and doesn’t have the fiber associated with flax seed. Flax seed by itself is a lot better simply because it has so much fiber. Fish oil supplements are your friend.
For healthy monosaturated fats, buy a bottle of olive oil. Get some balsamic vinegar, mix it with the olive oil, add to spinach for a spinach salad or dip your broccoli in it to add some fat & flavor. Can even top the spinach with some flax seed to increase the fiber & healthy fat.
Just saw the calorie split with the fat/carb/protein totals. A good number to shoot for concerning fat is ~30% of your total calories. Your calorie total might be a little low for your age/weight if you are trying to put on muscle as well. I’m around 9-10% BF @ 165-170 lbs and 3000 calories is just above maintenance for me.
You’ll have to play around with your calorie total and see how your body responds to it to figure out what works best for you. Again, judging by your pics, it’ll probably be a lot easier for you to simply cut 10-15 lbs of fat using a direct approach like UD2 / V-diet, then pick up a cleaner, muscle building diet like you have above.
Thanks for your advice man. How much muscle do you think i would lose if i wanted to get down to a BF% where I would look pretty cut, not sure what % this would be as every person varies…but possibly 8-10%, if i follwed that V-Diet
You might not lose any muscle at all if you do it right. As a rule you’ll probably screw up (lol) at first, either not losing as quickly or by losing too much muscle. Evaluate what you could do better based on your results, and you’re bound to find something that works good for your body. To butcher the words of Paul Coehlo, the secret to life is to fall down seven times and to get up eight times, or something like that.
I really want to cut and in order to get to 10% roughly how long would i have to do the diet and how much weight do you think i would lose total. As it may be a problem for football which is from April to September (yeah right in the times when i want to be lean for summer, but cant because i need to be heavier for football) if i lose too much weight.
if that was the case…thats why i was hoping this diet would allow me to slowly lose fat whilst slowly building muscle to maintain roughly the same weight 190+, nothing drastic but just gain a leaner appearance.
Really, it’s not a big deal to drop 10 lbs of fat on a 4-6 week cycle on UD2 with minimal muscle loss. UD2 can be set up to lean out while building a little bit of muscle and increasing strength if that’s really what you want to do. It’s pretty complicated though, and you’ll probably just have to end up reading the book if you’d want to do something like that.
I really dislike these sort of setups simply because your workouts are tailored to your diet. I like to tailor my diet to my workouts. If you are lifting to be a good football player you don’t want 2 of your 4 workouts a week being a ‘depletion’ workout… it’s just simply a waste. Spend 4 weeks on a direct cut, then train the 3 months on a clean diet leading up to football season for max power, strength, conditioning, etc.
Why slowly lean out over the course of 4 months and with marginal increases in strength and power when you cut directly first for a month, then enter football season @ 10% BF with 3 months of hard football-oriented training behind you? You might end up heavier than before and with a better body composition if you play your cards right.
Ok fine…you’ve convinced me. I guess i’ll never know if i dontt give it a try lol. What do you suggest i cut wit…the Velocity Diet? and also what kind of diet would be best for me after i have lost the fat to prepare me for football?
I’ve never used the V-diet personally, UD2 here, but the principles are basically the same. Given that, I’d probably try the V-diet simply given the wealth of information on it on this website. The main problem with the V-diet is it’s really unforgiving in terms the social aspect; there’s no ‘day off’, whereas UD2 can be set up so that on friday/saturday you can eat like a relatively ‘normal’ person. A modified version of your original diet would be great for after you have cut to your desired BF to workout for before football.
30/30/40% (30% fat / 30% protein / 40% carb) is a good split for building muscle. Stick the carbs around/after the workout. Key points: make sure you are getting enough fat, no sweets, and have good workout nutrition. It’s easy to forget about fat when maximizing lean meats / low gi carbs. How many calories you intake is really dependent on how hard/long you are working out and what your BW is at the end of your cut. Someone @ your height/weight/age can easily burn in excess of 3500 calories on a workout day, even over 4000.