Bodybuilding Diet Quiz
In muscle building what you eat is almost as important as how you train. Eat and train well and you'll get big. Train well and eat wrong and you struggle to make progress. This simple quiz articles helps you to identify some common muscle building diet mistakes many newbies make. Rock this quiz and you know your changes to build the body you deserve are much better.
Do you get enough protein?
There's no getting around this. You need protein to get big. It's what your muscles are made of. A good rule of thumb is to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of lean bodyweight. Lean bodyweight means everything else besides fat mass.
On the other hand eating excessive protein doesn't help. Your body can only use so much. And remember that protein also contains calories, 4 calories for every gram of protein. So if you gorge on protein it means you gorge on calories also. And you know that that means? You'll get fat.
So you want to make sure you get enough protein but not more than you need. That's the sweet spot and starting with 1 gram of protein per pound of lean mass is a good estimate to start with.
Do you eat the right carbs?
In muscle building carbohydrates are almost as important as protein is. Carbohydrates are what fuels your muscles during the intensive work you do at the gym. Without carbs your muscles wouldn't have energy to work and you couldn't lift heavy weights.
Carbohydrates also "spare" protein. Because in the absence of carbohydrates your body is going to convert protein into carbohydrates and then burn it as energy. And you don't want that. We need that protein to build muscles, not burned for energy.
So in order to prevent this from happening you need to give your body enough carbohydrates. This helps to spare the protein for more important uses.
Now, you just can't eat any carbohydrate you want. There are good carbohydrates and there are bad carbs. Good carbs are what's known as complex carbohydrates, and these include whole grains, beans, brown rice and so on. These foods give you a steady supply of energy, and that's what you want.
Then we have what's known as simple carbs, and these for muscle building (and health) purposes are bad. They are absorbed so quickly and they provide a spike of energy and then crash. Simple carbs are things like sugar, pastries, white flour and rice. Most junk and processed food is filled with simple (bad) carbs.
You need more of your carbohydrates to come from complex carbs. This way you'll get a steady supply of energy throughout the whole day.
But there's a place for those simple carbs also.
Did you remember to cheat?
As weird as it sounds, cheating makes your diet healthier! This is because sticking to healthy diet is hard. You'll get cravings. And if you ignore those most likely you crash massively one day. This is the day you lose control and binge with gallons of ice cream and chips and coke. And then you get fat.
So to work around this you should allow yourself some cheat day. How often you have to decide for yourself, but maybe once or twice a week is good to start with.
But even during cheat days you need to keep your wits with you. You need to moderate your cheating by allowing yourself some sweets and treats, but not going overboard with it. Discipline yourself to say enough when you've had enough.
So how did you do with this simple quiz? If you didn't score 3 out of 3 then you've found an area that needs more work. And that's good news because you are making progress and taking steps towards the body you deserve. So now go out there and put what you learned here into action.
