By a “bodybuilder’s diet” I mean eating a lot of food in total, consisting of: a lot of protein from lean meat like chicken, low fat and carbs, lots of fruit and vegetables, lots of fiber, drinking lots of water. No supplements, no protein shakes. I’m not talking about eating a ridiculous amount of food like the enormous professional bodybuilders, but eating significantly more than you normally would, with small, frequent meals through the day. But not working out, and not doing any exercise.
What would happen? Bodybuilders, obviously, use that diet to put on a lot of muscle while trimming their fat way down, but they’re working out. Would you put on fat because you’re eating so much, or would you put on some sort of ‘bulk’ but still look toned and lean because the diet is so healthy? Is it possible it could be converted to extra muscle even if you didn’t work out?
I basically eat that way. Assuming a normal level of caloric intake, the result for me has been solid muscle with soft, or slab like definition rather than a lean, cut look. However, I work outside most of the time and burn a lot of calories. My job provides my exercise. If I merely ate that way and sat at a desk, I’d get fat. The same as you will on any diet. All diets boil down to calories in vs calories expended. The composition is basically for tuning towards certain goals.
I don’t really understand what you just said. But if you eat more calories than you expend, you will put on fat. If you have a heavy workout program, you will put on muscle also; a little more in favour of muscle if your diet is protein-heavy, but not magically so. Bodybuilders tend to cut after they bulk. Putting on muscle without putting on fat at the same time is very difficult; they tend to build up, and then diet to remove the fat.
No. The only way to build muscle is to have a calorie surplus and do exercise.
working out is the only way to build muscle. Some people are predisposed to be fairly muscular naturally, so it’s a little iffy… but no, eating a healthy diet loaded with extra calories is going to make you fat. Your body doesn’t care whether or not the calories are healthy or empty. They will get turned to fat if you are getting more than you burn.
Let’s put it this way.
I’ve tried to put on 10 lbs over the last 8 months. I work out around 10hrs/week. I wanted to put all of this weight on as muscle, but I’ve only been able to gain around 6lbs of muscle - the rest is fat. If I didn’t work out, I not only would have put all the extra weight on as fat, but I would have lost existing muscle mass.
I get what you guys are saying, and I think it clearly isn’t possible to put on gym-style muscle without going to the gym. But isn’t there some sort of middle ground between “eat more, put on weight as fat” and “eat less, lose weight”?
As an example, people who come out of hospital having been ill for a couple of months tend to have lost a lot of weight. When they start eating properly again, they bulk back up, even without exercising, and it isn’t “fat”, at least in the layman’s sense. They don’t suddenly get a jiggling beer belly or love handles. But it isn’t really muscle either, it’s just their usual “bulk”. Obviously this is an unusual scenario, because they’re coming out of hospital and they’re much skinnier than usual. But do you see what I’m saying about how they put on weight without it really being either the layman’s notion of “muscle” or “fat”? Is it not possible for the average person to put on something like that by eating a lot of healthy food, even without exercising?
But, they are exercising. People in the hospital generally spend a lot of time in bed. Once they get out, they start to walk around and use their muscles a lot more.
I think you’re misinterpreting what happens to the people who get out of hospital.
While in hospital, they got much less exercise than even a sedentary person - they weren’t even walking about from car to desk, or from fridge to couch, or grocery shopping. So they lost muscle mass.
When they get up and start walking around again, they gain back that same muscle mass. Not necessarily toned, weight-lifter mass. Just the normal soft muscle mass that even a near-couch potato has. And they gain it back from just normal walking around combined with eating some excess calories. Basically, minimal exercise compared with no exercise.
Bodybuilders don’t really eat like this. You’ve got some confusion and conflating going on here. You are conflating aspects a bodybuilder’s off-season “bulking” diet with his/her pre-contest diet.
While it’s true that during the pre-contest diet a bodybuilder will go on an extremely low carb, moderately-low fat and very-high protein diet; at all other times of the year they are training to increase their muscle mass. To do this requires substantial carbs and healthy fats, albeit selected and consumed in the right way.
Simultaneously stripping body fat while increasing muscle mass is impossible for any advanced bodybuilder (or athlete in general). The goal of a pre-contest diet is stripping as much bodyfat as possible while simultaneously retaining as much muscle mass as possible.
Also, during muscle-gaining periods, many bodybuilders will reduce the number of meals eaten a day, while increasing the total calories consumed. Consuming small, frequent meals throughout the day is a metabolic tool for fat loss, not muscle gain.
So if you eat like a bodybuilder, it is important to note whether you are eating like a pre-contest bodybuilder or an off-season bodybuilder. Because if you eat like the former, without also working out, you’ll end up looking pretty lean anyway. But if you eat like the latter, you are going to look like a Twinkie. Granted, it may take a bit longer than if you simply gorged on McDonald’s all day, every day, but in the end the weight results would pretty damn similar.
Yes, of course there’s some amount of eating which will keep your weight steady at a reasonable level. That amount of eating is less than what a bodybuilder eats.
Not bodybuilding but a friend of mine was a competition-standard swimmer (missed out on the Olympics because his peak year was in the wrong part of the 4-year cycle, according to him). He stopped swimming in his mid-20s but carried on eating his swimmer’s diet. Result? He was 300 lbs of pure blubber when I first met him. Really huge calf muscles, mind you.
The op being answered allow me to disagree with this as an absolute. One can build muscle without a calorie suplus if one has some modest amount of fat to burn for baseline metabolic needs and gets in adequate nutrition, especially protein within a reasonable window of the exercise. It is difficult to gain muscle while both losing fat mass and overall weight but far from impossible. See, for example, here. Three groups, all restricted to 80% of caloric needs. One just low calorie, one low calorie with resistance exercise and 1.5g/kg of protein in the form of casein, and one low calorie with resistance exercise and 1.5g/kg of protein in the form of whey. All lost about 2.5 kg over 12 wks but the two resistance exercise and added protein groups did so with greater loss of fat mass, putting on muscle mass, and increasing strength.
This is definitely true; the reason most (any?) serious bodybuilders don’t try to focus on a diet that builds muscle mass and reduces fat at the same time is because it doesn’t create the sort of min/max results that competitive bodybuilding requires. So they bulk up aggressively, conceding that they will add some fat (some even concede quite a bit of extra fat, and if you look at some pictures of famous bodybuilders off season some of them have quite a lot of fat coating their muscle mass), and then they basically cut aggressively hoping to retain as much muscle mass as possible.
Bodybuilders like Ambivalid I believe are part of the natural bodybuilding scene (at least from my recollection), which means at best they are going to have some real muscle loss when cutting. Professional body builders in the IFBB tend to use chemicals such as anabolic steroids, HGH, etc that enable you to retain far more muscle mass than you normally would while cutting. I have no idea if Arnold was BSing or not, but what he always said about his own steroid use is that he primarily used it to cut without losing mass. That may sound like it “barely” contributed to his size, but in fact it could be quite a bit of it.
If you look at any Olympic weightlifter or strongman, they are big guys with big muscles, but they don’t look like a bodybuilder, they have a lot of fat. This is because power lifters to maximize strength gains will almost always end up collecting excess fat in addition to their muscles. If they cared about their appearance for purposes of competition, and were able to shed that fat without losing a huge amount of muscle mass, they’d start to look more and more like a huge IFBB body builder.
Your body is mostly muscle, fat, bone, and organs. If you gain weight, and are otherwise healthy, it’s going to be muscle or fat. You won’t gain muscle without exercising the muscle, so that pretty much leaves fat.
OK, I’ll concede it’s within the range of possibility but infinitesimally unlikely without an extraordinary amount of expertise and dedication. In the real world, outside that of expensively managed Olympians and actors, it’s as good as impossible.