Eating a well balanced diet is integral to building lean muscle while lifting weights. If you simply lift weights but don’t eat properly, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot because the muscle you gain by lifting weights will be stripped off to sustain the process of lifting weights. Sounds like a raw deal, doesn’t it? It’s pretty tough to find a good set of meal plans online, but to help you decide what’s in a good meal plan, here are three things you should be looking out for in a prospective program.
1. Variety
The last thing you want to be doing while building lean muscle is eating the same boring protein-rich food over and over again. It’s already hard enough as it is with the never-ending protein shakes and supplements. A good meal plan will give you some healthy meals that are actually delicious.
Furthermore, it will make muscle building more enjoyable by providing a different recipe as an idea for a meal. Tired of that lean steak and vegetables? No problem! You can try the skinless chicken stir fry.
2. Ratio
The foods it will provide for you will already be in a given ratio of protein, carbohydrates and fats. The last thing you want to be doing is unknowingly eating foods that look healthy but are actually high in saturated fat, especially if you’ve just bulked up and are in the cutting stage of your work out.
Depending on whether you’re maintaining your body weight, progressively building or cutting fat, a good meal plan will accommodate for you requirements. You shouldn’t have to question the writer of the meal plan, if he’s professional enough to realize that there are vegetarian weight lifters and people who wish to stay under a budget while staying healthy.
3. Flexibility
A good meal plan will allow for room to eat your own foods that you’re used to now and again. It’s not like if you eat a roast one night and all your hard work just went down the drain. It will educate you and you should be able to figure out whether eating differently one night will waver much from your ratio. Now, of course we’re not talking about eating out and totally pigging out on the all you can eat; the responsibility to eat properly is always up to you, but you should be able to substitute and roughly match up nutritional requirements from a good set of meal plans.
Variety, nutritional ratio and flexibility are the key signs of a good set of meal plans. If you’re building muscle and want to eat properly, these are what you should be looking for.
Cheng is the owner of http://howtogetleanmuscle.blogspot.com. It’s geared towards helping regular men with no experience in lifting weights learn how to get lean muscle.
