2873: Eat Big to Get Big - Why You Can’t Eat to Grow by Christian Finn of MuscleEvo on How to Gain Muscle

[00:00:00] Überlass deine gesunde Ernährung und die Gains nicht nur deinem Bauchgefühl. Denn bei der Ernährung gaukelt uns unser innerer Schweinehund manchmal ganz schön was vor. Sag stattdessen Hallo zu deinem neuen Coach, Yasio. Yasio ist die meistgenutzte Ernährungs-App Europas, made in Germany. Egal ob Massephase oder ein bisschen Abnehmen, tracke Kalorien, Proteine, Carbs, Fette, Bewegung und Intervallfasten. Und mit den Tasty-Rezepten bist du ready für deine Ziele. Let's go! Lade die Yasio-App jetzt herunter.

[00:00:30] This is Optimal Health Daily. Eat Big to Get Big? Why You Can't Eat to Grow by Christian Finn of MuscleEvo.net. And I'm Dr. Neal, your host and narrator. Happy Tuesday and welcome back to another episode of Optimal Health Daily. This is where I read to you from some of the best health and fitness blogs on the web, kind of like an ongoing audio book, but always with my commentary at the end. And in fact, today's topic is kind of personal to me.

[00:00:58] Back in my early days of resistance training, I tried to eat a lot of food to try and get bigger and more muscular. I'll save my experiences for my commentary at the end, but I wanted to remind you that I hope you find this show helpful. Meaning, I hope that you find that we give you nice shortcuts so that you don't have to make the same mistakes that I or some of our authors have made. One of the things I love about doing this show is I get to share with you these shortcuts.

[00:01:29] Alright, hopefully I've piqued your interest and you're excited to hear today's episode, so let's get right to the post as we optimize your life. Eat big to get big? While you can't eat to grow. By Christian Finn of MuscleEvo.net When it comes to diet and exercise, I have made a great many mistakes over the years.

[00:01:54] Perhaps the biggest was spending far too much of my late teens and early 20s carrying around too much fat. My main goal was to gain as much muscle as humanly possible. And I believed, wrongly as it turns out, that doing so involved nothing more than eating a vast amount of food. I'd been told that I needed to eat big to get big. So that's exactly what I did. Eat big to get big. As a result, I ended up gaining a lot of weight.

[00:02:23] And did a very thorough job of convincing myself that A. Most of this weight consisted of muscle. And B. The day would soon come when I would strip away the fat to reveal the Herculean physique I'd been working on all these years. In truth, I was diluting myself on a grand scale. If you're carrying around a decent amount of muscle, adding a layer of fat can create the illusion of size, especially when you're wearing clothes.

[00:02:51] People may say that you're looking bigger, which is always nice to hear. And you might feel that warm glow of satisfaction when you step on the bathroom scales and see your weight going up every week. But what's the point if you're just getting fat? Contrary to all this eat big to get big nonsense out there, you can't increase the rate of muscle hypertrophy simply by stuffing yourself with food. Someone in their first few months of training is going to build muscle relatively quickly

[00:03:20] and will need a diet to support that rate of growth. But once you've moved past the beginner stages of training, the speed at which you gain muscle will have slowed down. All of which means you're not going to need to eat as much food. Extra energy that isn't used to fuel your workouts, to help you recover from these workouts, or to support the muscular remodeling process that occurs in the hours and days after training will just end up stored as fat. Why you can't eat to grow

[00:03:50] What you do in the gym is only part of the story when it comes to building muscle. Without enough food, much of your efforts in the gym will go to waste. But that doesn't give you a license to go and eat anything and everything in sight. There's an upper limit on the amount of nutrients you can take in and turn into muscle. If you're currently eating below this upper limit, then you'll build muscle faster by increasing your nutrient intake. But once you've maxed out your rate of muscle gain,

[00:04:19] simply adding more calories won't automatically lead to a faster rate of growth. No matter how much food you shovel into your mouth, you can't force feed muscle growth. Let's say that the amount of energy required to keep you alive fuel activity and maximize the rate at which you gain muscle is, let's say, 3,000 calories per day. But you're only eating 2,000 calories per day. In this case, taking in an extra 1,000 calories will lead to a faster rate of muscle growth.

[00:04:49] But just because those extra 1,000 calories have helped you gain muscle faster doesn't mean that doubling up on the calories is going to result in muscle being built twice as fast. That is, bumping up your calorie intake still further to 4,000 calories won't make your muscles grow any faster. In other words, there's a sweet spot to be found between not enough and too many calories. Find that sweet spot, and you'll be able to maximize your rate of muscular growth

[00:05:18] while minimizing the amount of fat that's gained. Think of your diet as permissive in the sense that it allows the muscle-building stimulus delivered in the gym to manifest itself as an increase in muscle mass over time. According to strength and muscle coach Dr. Eric Helms, quote, Training is the actual stimulus, while nutrition is only permissive to muscle growth. What do I mean by permissive? I mean that nutrition can permit the growth of muscle tissue,

[00:05:47] but it is not the root cause. That is the function of training. Eating to grow is a misnomer. All you can do is eat to provide the ideal environment to permit growth. You can train to grow, but you cannot truly eat to grow. The reason I'm harping on this semantic difference is because this misunderstanding has led many down the path of putting on unnecessary body fat way too fast. End quote. Final thoughts.

[00:06:17] The eat big to get big approach makes sense if you're skinny and tend to burn through a lot of calories each day. But for a lot of people, particularly those who have a hard time gaining muscle, it can mean putting on three or four pounds of fat for every pound of muscle that's gained. This will leave you facing a lengthy diet for just a few pounds of muscle gained. The last thing you want is to have a large proportion of your weight gain come from fat and then have to waste time and energy getting rid of it all.

[00:06:50] You just listened to the post titled Eat Big to Get Big? While You Can't Eat to Grow by Christian Finn of MuscleEvo.net. And I'll be right back with my commentary. When was the last time you checked if your insurance still fits your needs? With Insurance Pro Agencies powered by VIU by Hub, find the right coverage in minutes. Visit topratedquotes.com or text RATES to 855-665-0829

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[00:07:49] helping you protect what matters most. Insurance has never been this easy. Texting RATES means you will receive information and occasional promotional messages. Message and data rates may apply. You can reply STOP to opt out at any time. Dr. Neil here for my commentary. Ah, eating to get big. Like I shared at the top of the show, I too tried eating to get big. I still remember, when I first started getting into strength training,

[00:08:17] my buddy and I would try and lift heavy all the time and eat lots of food to try and quote-unquote bulk up. Now, this was before I received all of the education and training I have now. So please keep that in mind when I share with you this one example. I remember one of my dinners during this phase consisted of an 1100 calorie chicken bowl with beans and rice, two slices of cheese pizza, and a glass of milk. Now that did not include the peanut butter milkshake I had as a snack in the afternoon,

[00:08:46] my lunch, which usually contained four eggs, and my breakfast. Now because I wasn't performing any other exercises like cardio or high intensity interval training or really much of anything else at the time, I gained weight. And most of it was fat weight. Within months, my waist ballooned from 30 inches to 36 inches. My blood cholesterol levels became dangerously high. And when I would compare pictures of myself

[00:09:15] pre-bulking phase to my 36 inch waist phase, people would tell me that my muscles looked exactly the same as before. And that broke my heart. Sure, I was stronger because of all the heavy lifting. But now, I had actually increased my risk for disease. This is the opposite of what I was trying to do. So, I needed to drop this bulking program and rethink my training. It took a while, but I played around with all sorts of other eating and training methods

[00:09:44] and finally found what worked for me. And in fact, when you ask some of the professional trainers that movie studios hire to make their actors look like superheroes, they actually talk about how important it is for their actors to be very careful about how much food they eat every day. In fact, in order to get into Superman shape, Henry Cavill's trainer, Mark Twight, said that he had to severely restrict Henry's diet in order for his muscles to pop like they did. His diet was so restricted,

[00:10:14] Henry would often experience mood swings. He talks about this in interviews all the time. Now, this does not mean you have to go to these lengths to achieve this muscle-popping look, but it furthers the point that if you want to have that muscular physique, less may be more when it comes to your food intake. Don't make the same mistakes Christian and I made. All right, that'll do it for the Tuesday episode. I hope you're having a wonderful week so far, and I'll be back here tomorrow as usual where your optimal life awaits. Let's do it. .