Your Ultimate Body Transformation Plan

by Nick Mitchell

  Because I know some of you will want to know this, my own personal rule of thumb for getting into superhuman lean shape is to take in 10–12 calories per lb of bodyweight, assuming exercise levels are not crazy. That means a 200-lb man wanting to get leaner can use a calorie base of between 2,000 and 2,400 calories as a very rough starting point when working out his daily food intake.

  My rough rule of thumb for gaining muscle is that a starting point for calories can be between 13 and 16 calories per lb of bodyweight, assuming you can at least see an outline of your abdominal muscles.

  If truth be told I am loath to even give you this general number because the advice is just too broad and generic. The best way to work out your calorie level is to nail your maintenance diet based on the guidelines in the previous chapter, and then sit down with a pen and paper and work out how many calories you are taking in to maintain your bodyweight and keep good energy levels, all while eating a ‘clean’ diet.

  My issue with anyone trying to calculate a calorie level prior to embarking on a correct eating regime is that the net calorie impact of 2,000 calories of standard Homer Simpson nutrition is a world away from the impact of 2,000 calories a day of The Ultimate Body Transformation Guide nutrition.

  However, if it feels too much like you are winging it by not having some numbers to work towards you can base your starting diet off one of the meal plans (in this book and many more to be found in www.UltimateTransformation.Guide) and then tweak it based on your results.

  NUTRITION FOR MUSCLE BUILDING

  It is my sincere belief that the whole subject of nutrition and muscle building has been dramatically over-complicated by parties who have a vested interest in making things more complicated. I could easily write an entire book on the subject that would leave you confused by multiple options and no better off than if we keep it simple and to the point. To that end, this section will deal with clear rules and at the end, if you are minded to follow one, we have sample meal plans (that I loathe, but I appreciate that many of you feel the need to see one).

  START AT THE BEGINNING

  Most people want to kick off a new regime with all the bells and whistles possible, yet many trainers will tell you that you need to make only small incremental changes. They are partly right and partly wrong.

  Jumping into a programme head first isn’t always the worst idea, especially if you’ve given yourself a tight 12-week deadline, but you always need to give yourself room to tweak a plan, and you always but always need to make changes based on what you have done before. Allow me to explain further.

  The very first thing we need to know when constructing your new muscle-building diet is how you have been eating previously. If you’ve been eating one meal a day then the initial changes we make are going to be wildly different than if you’ve already been eating five solid meals and downing two protein shakes every day. So the very first thing I want you to do is write down everything you’ve eaten for the last few days and use that as your starting point. We will get into the ‘what you do next’ in the rules that follow.

  MOST ‘HARD-GAINERS’ DO NOT EAT ENOUGH FOOD

  You have to eat to grow. I know it sounds a bit trite, but it is also very true, and it is arguably the number one reason for the failure of most hard-gainers’ muscle-building dreams. Eating for size when you have a fast metabolism is a chore. You need to be disciplined, consistent and eat according to the clock, not according to hunger. Always stuffing your face can grow very tiresome and is the hardest part of bodybuilding for many people, skinny guys and professional bodybuilders alike.

  If five meals a day are not doing the trick and everything else (training and recovery) is on point, then it is very possible that six meals a day will help accelerate progress.

  WHEN IN DOUBT, EAT MORE

  If muscle building is your primary transformational goal then the assumption is that you are a naturally slim and skinny individual who doesn’t put fat on easily at all. If this is the case, then when in doubt always eat more. Your body is either anabolic (building up) or catabolic (breaking down), and a steady supply of calories from the right macronutrients will assist anabolism at the expense of catabolism.

  This is not a prescription for the old ‘bulking’ staple of the ‘see-food’ diet – you see food and you eat it. That is wrong as too many people will end up just getting fat, which is neither healthy nor conducive to creating the right hormonal environment for muscle building. If you are full then you are full, and some of you may need to work on improving your appetite (see the supplements section for things like digestive enzymes that can help with this issue), but I don’t believe in gorging and I don’t believe in eating endless supplies of junk food.

  NEVER SKIP A MEAL

  If the rapid accumulation of muscle is your goal then I do not believe in ever skipping meals. I think that those of us who are training hard and aiming to add extra muscle tissue should eat every three hours on the clock. Apart from when sleeping!

  If you read the internet forums, you may have come across the concept that meal timing is unimportant and as long as you hit your macronutrients over the course of a 24-hour period all will be fine and dandy. I hope that you can think sensibly and see that this doesn’t make sense. Our hormones fluctuate during the course of the day, and so does our ability to absorb and utilise food.

  When it comes to building maximum muscle what you need to understand is that your body is either synthesising protein (using amino acids to build up your body) or breaking down (cannibalising amino acids, often from your muscle tissue). There is no in-between on this. Essentially you are either anabolic or you are catabolic. Because we want to maximise anabolism we should aim to ensure that the opportunities to cannibalise muscle tissue are few and far between.

  This means frequent protein feedings (research now suggests that protein synthesis peaks at about two hours after eating, which also means that non-stop grazing isn’t the ideal approach if we want to maximise the peak, and returns to base levels an hour or two after that) are the order of the day. Two mega meals a day just doesn’t cut it, no matter what some internet guru tells you.

  The other hormonal factor that should push you towards frequent, not occasional, feedings is that stable insulin levels are important for anabolism. Small and regular feedings will help promote that.

  CALORIES COUNT – SOME OF THE TIME

  There is a popular notion among some modern-day trainers that ‘calories don’t count’. This is total BS. The law of thermodynamics applies to the human body just as it does to everything else. If we don’t burn the calories we eat it must mean that the body has used them to build something. So if we need to grow we need to eat more calories than our Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).

  However, we can complicate things a little bit. Do you think that 1,000 calories from steak, baked potato and sweetcorn will have the same impact metabolically, hormonally and physiologically as 1,000 calories from bread, chocolate spread and fizzy drinks? I sincerely hope that you answered ‘no’. This means that not all calories are created equal and that calorie-counting, be it for fat loss or muscle gain, only really applies when you are consistently consuming the same foods.

  The way for you to approach your muscle-building diet is to keep an eye on your calorie intake (do I need to tell you that the calories must come from the ‘right’ foods?) and if the scale is not budging upwards in the manner that you’d like then after a five-day period boost those calories by between 5 and 15 per cent. How much you boost them is going to be down to your appetite, your fear of getting fat, whether you have boosted them before, and your ability to schedule in more or simply larger meals.

  Some of you will be meticulous in tracking calories, and I have no problem at all with that. Others will be more like me and keep a rough eye on things and simply increase portion size and/or meal frequency. The absolute best way is to be precise and meticulous; after all, the better you track anything the easier it becomes to manipulate the variabl
es needed to improve your results. But if you can’t face being so precise then don’t worry, it is still possible to make great gains without recording every morsel that passes your mouth.

  LIQUID CALORIES VERSUS ‘REAL’ FOOD

  A standard question that I must get asked ten times a day on Twitter is ‘How many shakes can I have a day?’

  No one seems to want to eat multiple meals a day and everyone looks for the shortcut provided by protein shakes. This is wrong.

  Liquid calories can be useful at times such as post-workout, but the nutrients in ‘real food’ are going to promote an infinitely healthier, and therefore more responsive to muscle building, environment. However, allow me to now go on to contradict myself completely.

  Whereas in an ideal world you would get your hypothetical 3,500 calories a day from five to six ‘feedings’ of solid food, a lot of you naturally skinny guys are going to really struggle to consume that quantity of food. Yes, there are tricks you can employ such as using digestive enzymes (or, even better, just eat half a papaya), but taking a person who has at best only ever eaten three smallish meals a day and asking him to jump up to six decent meals a day is often a step too far. And this is where drinking your calories can be a real blessing.

  YOU CAN MAKE A CALORIE-RICH AND NUTRIENT-DENSE SHAKE OUT OF THE FOLLOWING:

  Full-fat or raw milk. Raw milk may be difficult to purchase and if you have any concerns over its safety then you should avoid it.

  Fruit and berries. Frozen berries in a shake are great.

  Green vegetables. I know, it sounds revolting. It is. But back in the day I used to know guys who would blend up chicken breasts, so quit your whining!

  Oats.

  Flaxseed oil.

  Whey protein powder. Try to avoid the high-sugar ‘weight gain powder’ rubbish.

  Nuts.

  Honey.

  Yoghurt or cream. For those who really need the extra calories!

  © Shutterstock.com

  For those of you who can’t or won’t eat solid food my advice is to make a shake (or multiple shakes, which is what I did myself when I was in my early 20s and desperate to get the biggest muscles possible) out of some or all of the following ingredients. I am not going to give you set quantities because you will all have different macronutrient and calorie goals, so you will still need to do a little bit of calculating yourself to factor this into your diet.

  THE OVERWHELMING IMPORTANCE OF INSULIN SENSITIVITY

  Understand this about the ‘mother hormone’ insulin:

  It is the most anabolic hormone we produce. It drives nutrients into our cells.

  For fat people it can be the devil; for skinny aspiring muscle-heads it needs to be your best friend.

  If you are lucky, your body is very insulin sensitive. This means that when you get an insulin response (typically from eating carbohydrates) your muscle cells ‘open’ up and take in the nutrients being shuttled by the insulin, making you bigger and more muscular.

  If you are unlucky, and most skinny guys will not have this problem as it is usually exacerbated by carrying too much body fat, you will be insulin resistant. This means that your body over-produces insulin, causing an indiscriminate shuttling of nutrients into your fat cells, making you bigger, but only because you’re getting fatter, which is not the aim of the game.

  Now that you appreciate the importance of insulin sensitivity, the question becomes what do we do to improve or maintain it? The answer is to cycle your carbohydrate intake over the course of a few days, monitoring your body fat levels (if you start to add too much body fat then pull back on the carbs and calories for a little while), and weight train like a machine!

  Two notes of warning. First, if you are carrying a spare tyre then this approach isn’t for you and you need to get leaner above anything else. Second, even if you are lean, if you feel sleepy after eating a reasonable amount of carbs, such as a decent-sized serving of rice, for example, then there’s a strong chance that you are naturally a bit insulin resistant. My advice if that is the case is for you to still take a carb-cycling approach, but to not be overly aggressive with higher intake days.

  I am always loath to give you too many examples of how to carb cycle because what I want to teach you is the importance of listening to your body, assessing feedback (gym performance, mirror, tape measure) and adapting accordingly. It’s the weakness of a book that we are forced to take a more general approach and I know it will frustrate some of you because you just want me to tell you exactly what to do.

  Please understand that I cannot do this because there are so many individual factors unique to your circumstances that we need to take into account. Hence my goal is to teach you to think for yourself rather than give you overly prescriptive dogma. If you do want various real-life carb-cycle examples then please refer to the meal plans section of this book.

  Carbs are ‘protein sparing’, which means that the more carbs you consume the less likely your body is to use carbs for its energy requirements. So while this might seem counterintuitive, whereas I might err on the high side for protein intake when on a fat-loss diet and dropping carbs, for muscle building we can keep protein a little lower than we do for certain fat-loss-focused diets.

  Here is an example of how we might do things if 3,000 calories a day was your maintenance level calories and you normally ate a 40 per cent carbs (C), 30 per cent protein (P) and 30 per cent fat (F) macronutrient split. There are four calories per gram of carbs and protein and nine calories per gram of fat, so 40 per cent of your calorie intake from carbs would be 1,200 calories and 300 grams of carbs. We could, and if you want to get so detailed you should, break it down like this:

  * * *

  Sample macronutrient breakdown

  40 per cent carbs = 1,200 cals = 300g C

  30 per cent protein = 900 cals = 225g P

  30 per cent fat = 900 cals = 100g F

  Total calories = 3,000

  * * *

  If this was your hypothetical normal day’s maintenance ‘healthy’ eating, and we decided to carb cycle for muscle gain, what’s the first thing that we do?

  The right answer is not to manipulate carb intake! It is to set a baseline protein goal. That’s always the first nutrition rule in putting together a muscle-building diet. I like a range of 1–2g per pound of lean bodyweight. 2g is typically a bit high, if I am being honest, but we might opt for that as a goal because it’s a fair strategy to get protein intake up to a decent level as hitting 1.5g out of a 2g target is much better than hitting 0.5g out of a 1g target.

  If our hypothetical example weighs a lean 200lb and we are happy with his 225g of daily protein as being the minimal baseline intake, then if we carb cycle we have no wiggle room to ever drop his protein. But we can increase his protein at the expense of carbs or fat should we so desire. We can, of course, also manipulate carb and fat ratios as part of a carb-cycling approach.

  CAN WE MANIPULATE CALORIE INTAKE?

  Yes – but only in one direction. If 3,000 calories a day is the baseline intake to maintain current lean muscle mass then we can never go lower if optimising growth is our goal.

  So now you know two things for muscle-building carb cycling:

  Baseline protein shouldn’t go down. It can go up.

  Baseline calories shouldn’t go down. They can go up.

  Everything else can be manipulated according to how you respond. Which is where self-experimentation comes into play.

  SUPPLEMENTS CAN NEVER REPLACE FOOD

  We have a specific supplements section in this book, but I want to reinforce the message that supplements are by their very definition supplementary. They are useful merely to assist a limited diet or help to push you further than normal nutrition can.

  The very first thing you must do before even considering using supplements is to nail your nutrition. And if you want to get on my bad side then pop across to Twitter and tell me that you can’t wait to start one of my plans but that you’re not going to star
t until all your supplements are ready!

  I am not rabidly anti or pro supplements. I think there are good and bad companies in the market and I personally take a number of products every day. We even give a couple of supplements to my young children. I am, however, very reluctant to discuss them too much because far too many people get caught up with them as a crutch. On the flip side there are also the usual nay-sayers who loathe every supplement going and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

  As always, learn to think for yourself, don’t buy into someone else’s BS, and if a product sounds interesting for your goals then an open-minded experiment will always leave you better informed.

  PROTEIN GOAL

  The word ‘protein’ possibly derives from the Greek word ‘proteios’, meaning ‘the first quality’. As I’ve already told you, working out a daily protein goal is of primary importance (the first quality) for your muscle-building efforts as we often refer to protein as being the ‘building blocks’ of muscle growth.

  There’s a lot of conjecture over the ideal protein goal for a lean adult male seeking to add muscle mass. I veer between 1g and 2g per pound of lean bodyweight, going on the high end if carbs are low and training volume is high, and coming a little bit lower if training is less frequent and carb intake is at the upper end of the scale.

  To keep things extremely simple I want you to try to hit a daily target of 1.5g of protein per pound of bodyweight. So if you weigh 200lb then you should be eating 300g of protein spread out over four to six feedings.