Not Just a Man's World

At the start of my weight-loss phase I wrote an article about how I was altering my diet to assist with losing weight.  I’ve now started on a long muscle-building cycle (through the chilly winter months) and felt that it was only right to include an article about what has changed.

Turning a weight-loss diet into a muscle-building diet

For a muscle-building cycle I like to keep the structure of my meals and the sort of food I am eating the same as any other time.  This is partly because, even when building muscle, I continue to eat a paleo diet and I still have to fit my meals round a standard work day. 

There are some simple rules I am following:

Non-workout days

• Keep carbohydrate intake at 50g or less
• Total calorie intake as 13-14 times lean body mass (‘LBM’) (this is a low quotient, but my work capacity is still not that great – if I could do more exercise on non-workout days I could take this a little higher)
• Protein intake at least 1g per pound of LBM

Workout days

• 500-600 calories more than a non-workout day
• All additional calories in pre and post-workout meals
• Protein intake of 1.5-2g per pound of LBM
• Carbohydrate intake approximately 1g per pound of lean body mass or fractionally over (I have about 100-110g carbohydrate on a workout day, my LBM is at about 98 pounds)
• Most additional carbohydrates in the pre-workout meal
• Post-workout meal to be protein-based with minimal carbohydrates

What does a muscle-building diet look like for me?

For non-workout days my diet is very much the same as it was for my weight-loss cycle.  I have an extra egg at breakfast and lunchtime, I’ve got a spoonful of mayonnaise in my tuna coleslaw (which makes it much more palatable), but otherwise there are no changes.  I’m so small that those items make up the extra 200 calories I can have each day.  Making most of the changes with eggs is fantastic since an egg has such a good balance of protein and fat.

The workout nutrition is a bit more of a challenge.  I’m very busy at work at the moment so I was after something I could keep in a big Tupperware box in the fridge for the whole week.  By sticking to the paleo diet I also have to eat quite a lot of volume to get in sufficient carbohydrates.  It would be easier if I was going to sit and eat a small bowl of pasta with something on the side.

So how did I deal with the challenge?

Workout nutrition

After playing about on Fitday for some time (I really recommend Fitday to anyone who is trying to work out their nutrition balance) I settled on a mix of plain probiotic yoghurt with stewed fruit (generally a combination of apples, pears, plums and rhubarb – I spent a lot of the summer stewing and freezing fruit) and whey protein for my pre-workout meal. 

I spend an hour or so on a Friday night preparing the fruit and then mix it up with the yoghurt in an enormous box.  By Saturday afternoon when I have my first helping the fruit juices have thickened the yoghurt up so that it has a creamy, slightly solid texture to it.

As a side-note, I only stir in the whey protein to each portion just before I eat it.  I don’t know how much to make of the noise everyone makes about denaturing the protein, but it’s easy enough to stir it in once a portion is in the bowl.

Yoghurt is an excellent source of carbohydrate, as is stewed fruit.  In fact, not only does stewing it release more of the sugars in the fruit and therefore increase the carbohydrate content, but it’s also easier to consume in bulk when it has been stewed.

Just to give you an idea of how this actually looks (and why stewing to ease digestion becomes pretty crucial for me), a single portion of last week’s mix would have included:

• 250g yoghurt
• 3-4 apples
• 1 stick rhubarb
• 2-3 plums
• 30g whey protein powder (stirred into the mix it sweetens up the acidity of the yoghurt and fruit, though at the moment I’ve only got chocolate flavour, which is a bit odd).

Post-workout nutrition is much simpler.  I just have a small portion of quark. 

Quark is a beautiful foodstuff.  Made by leeching the whey out of yoghurt, it is incredibly high in protein but low in both fat and carbohydrate.  It’s also quite gentle on the stomach and easy to eat (it behaves a bit like a dry cream cheese), which is what you want at the end of a workout.

Does this work to build muscle?

It should do.  I can’t make any promises.  Women have to be incredibly careful when putting on muscle as it is incredibly easy for them to put on fat if they eat too much.  In comparison, men can generally get away with eating as many calories as they like when bulking and they won’t have too much trouble.  Last time I tried putting on muscle I got it wrong.  I followed general advice written for men, ate a huge amount and put on plenty of fat.

However, I’m taking more care this time.  I’m not eating everything in sight, and I’ve hopefully got the correct pre/post-workout macronutrient balance.  I’ve certainly done a lot more reading up on women-specific sites before starting out this time.

I’ll let you know what’s happened to my body composition and workout numbers in a couple of months.

Related posts:

1. Improving nutrition for muscle gain
2. What diet is best for losing weight?
3. Workout nutrition: protein, fat or carbohydrate?
4. Impact of diet on the menstrual cycle