I, like most of the members on this site, am trying to gain weight. It’s working, which is great. My question is about what I’m eating.
I take in around 3000-3500 calories a day, with about 200 grams of protein. I’ve gained 15 pounds in the last three months, and my lifts have all increased.
I am currently in high school, so a lot of my eating comes during the school day. When I leave school, I’ve consumed about half of my daily calories and protein (1595 calories and 101 grams of protein) and most of it is pretty healthy food, low fat, no saturated fat, etc. etc. Just good stuff.
However, after school, my diet is less…structured. I don’t scarf down pure junk food, but often I do eat relatively high fat foods such as fried chicken or pizza.
I’m satisfied with my weight gain and strength gain and size gain, but I’m curious at to your opinions on eating one or two “unhealthy” meals a day.
First of all, throw out the notion that fat is unhealthy, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s nothing wrong with saturated fat, but it should come from animal sources like beef and eggs, not fried chicken and pizza.
When you’re bulking up though, eating “bad” foods occasionally is hardly going to hurt (and may actually help if you’re having trouble eating enough).
As far as eating healthy goes, shoot for 90% adherence. If you’re eating 5 or 6 meals a day, give yourself 4 cheat meals a week.
[quote]wfifer wrote:
First of all, throw out the notion that fat is unhealthy, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s nothing wrong with saturated fat, but it should come from animal sources like beef and eggs, not fried chicken and pizza.
When you’re bulking up though, eating “bad” foods occasionally is hardly going to hurt (and may actually help if you’re having trouble eating enough).
As far as eating healthy goes, shoot for 90% adherence. If you’re eating 5 or 6 meals a day, give yourself 4 cheat meals a week. [/quote]
And to go further really aside from trans fats there are NO bad foods just foods that are bad for some goals
What is “unhealthy?” Is pizza unhealthy? Is meatloaf unhealthy? Is milk unhealthy? If your gaining muscle and not just fat, if you are getting stronger and not suffering any ill effects your eating is fine… but one can’t gain five pounds of fat free mass every month, and one can’t support that mass on only 3500 kcals. If you find that you need to keep increasing calories to keep gaining weight than all is fine. That is my opinion.
I agree with you guys, obviously, since I’m not staying away from “fatty” foods. I’m not looking to gain five fat free pounds of muscle a month, I don’t really see how that would ever be possible, and yes I know I will need to up the calories, I started around 2750 originally, so it’s not like I just picked a random number to stick with.