Eating to Build Muscle Mass - Eat More to Burn Fat and Pack on Muscle

While it's of course very important that you actually lift weights when trying to gain muscle mass, you must also be very conscious of how often you're eating and do your best to eat healthy. Now there's one thing I want to get out of the way first. If you're reading this and saying to yourself "I know" then you might as well leave right now.

Whenever you say "I know" your brain just shuts down and you stop paying attention. There's a huge difference between "I know" and "I do." Keeping an open mind and actually following through with ideas is the key to success.

Anyways it's very important for you to eat often throughout the day. On top of keeping you full of energy, eating often throughout the day does two things.

1.) It promotes muscle growth
Your body is essentially incredibly lazy. It does its best to use as little energy and calories as possible.

Do you think it takes a lot of calories to build new muscle? You better believe it! As long as you're eating plenty of calories throughout the day, your body will have no choice but to build new muscle as long as you're putting in the time at the gym.

2.) It protects muscle growth
Again going back to your body being lazy, it takes an incredible amount of calories to maintain muscle mass. Given the chance, your body will begin to break down your muscles for energy as soon as possible. Obviously, this is bad. To prevent this, eat every 2-3 hours and try to never go more than 4 hours without a meal. This will force your body to use food and stored fat as the energy source rather than your muscles.

And always remember, if you're feeding your body garbage like pizza, hot dogs, etc, then you're body and workouts are going to be garbage.

Cheat days/cheat meals are fine and actually recommended. When you start doing cheat weeks or saying "Oh I workout, I can eat crappy" then you are sabotaging any gains you might have made
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fitness,