How to Fit a Bodybuilding Diet Into Your Lifestyle

One of the hardest parts about gaining big muscle mass quickly is the diet. You’d think eating would be the easy part but pretty much as soon as you start trying to follow all the advice you get online, you realize that it’s tougher than it sounds. The sheer amount you have to eat alone is pretty challenging but it only gets tougher once you factor in how much it’s going to cost and how careful you have to be about what you eat.

 

This simply isn’t a particularly practical diet and it’s certainly not easy to stick to. You’ll be stuffing your face when you’re full and you’ll be desperately looking around for lean sources of protein while you’re travelling.

 

The secret to success then is to think about how you’re going to fit that diet into your regular routine. If you can do that, then you’ll find it’s much easier to stick to and that the gains start coming thick and fast. Most of us already have a set of habits and if you can structure your diet around those, then things will get a lot easier.

 

Changing Your Habits

The best place to start then is to look at your existing habits. What are the things you currently do regularly when it comes to eating and drinking. Perhaps you buy lunch at work, maybe you get a coffee on the way to work. Maybe you always make your breakfast at 7am every morning.

 

All these routines and habits are perfectly ripe for the picking because they’re already ‘structured’. All you need to do is to slightly change that structure and that way you can almost automate your protein and supplement intake.

 

For instance, if you can find a coffee shop that sells protein shakes (they exist) then you can swap your morning coffee for an additional shake. This is a fantastic trick right away because you’re getting 30grams+ of extra protein at no extra cost and without significantly altering your routine. The same goes for your morning breakfast cereal – could you replace that with an egg or two?

 

As for your lunch, a great trick is to try and find a local salad bar that sells eggs. If you can manage that then you can load up on a number of eggs very cheaply and eat them every day. Other salad bars will also sell chicken and it’s likewise common to find them providing spinach (full of phytoecdysteroids) – all amazing bodybuilding foods. Another alternative is to take your own packed lunch in and to find a local supermarket that sells cheap tuna or another affordable protein source.

 

Making it Count

At the same time, it can also be a smart move to identify the weak points in your routine. An example of this might be dinner. If you live with a significant other then you may find that they don’t want to eat steamed chicken and rice with you every night, which is something a lot of diets and workout blogs don’t take into account. How do you start eating a bodybuilding diet without becoming completely unsociable?

 

The key here is to accept the points where you’re going to struggle and to make it count the rest of the time. You don’t have to be ‘social’ at breakfast and lunch, so make these meals really count with lean protein and then cut yourself a little slack when you settle down to eat with your family. Or why not get smarter still and workout just before your dinner, turning your evening meal into a kind of carb backloading?

 

However you go about it, just try to build your diet around your existing routine and you’ll find it’s much easier to stick to!

 

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