Clean macro meals professional#

Here’s a recommended starting point, using a 175-pound male as an example: Calories:ġg x 175 lbs = 700 calories (175g protein)Ģ,800 calories x 0.25 = 700 calories (75g fat)Ģ,800-700-700 = 1,400 calories (350g carbs)įrom this starting point, everything needs to be tested, assessed, and refined in the real world to produce optimum results. Make no mistake, while we can argue over optimum dietary approaches into eternity, consistently hitting the right calories and macronutrients will always be the most important step in achieving any body composition goal, including bulking. Luckily, there is an alternative plan that optimizes food choices for overall health and quality of gains and is also flexible enough in structure to be practical in the real world. These plans may look immaculate on paper, but they rarely work off of it.

Clean macro meals professional#

That may work for the 5% of the population who are professional athletes and models, but it is not a sustainable approach for most of us with more common careers and lifestyles.

What’s the unappealing alternative? A hyper-micromanaged diet, or traditional “clean” bulk, where you eat every 1½ hours, carry around seven different plastic containers yielding a weird mix of tuna and broccoli odors, display obsessive-compulsive behavior, have your life revolve around your diet, and likely become a social hermit. This makes it harder to gain quality muscle mass with each successive bulk, and next to impossible to shed that last layer of flab when shifting into a shredding phase. If you are pounding foods loaded with sugar, trans fats, and omega-6 vegetable oils every day, cell-membrane integrity and elasticity can be compromised, chronic systemic inflammation can predispose you to disease-or at least debilitating joint pain-and you may just end up with the emotional stability of a seesaw.Įven if you’re not scared of disease, think emotions are for women, and care only about how you look, consider that poor food choices can reduce insulin sensitivity and nutrient partitioning toward the muscle cell. Even if this “crap loading” works physique-wise, it’s not a wise choice from a long-term health perspective. It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, just eat it, eat it, eat it: The “dirty” school of thought is that as long as you down enough protein, you can garbage disposal whatever else you want, regardless of food quality. These days, traditional bulking strategies tend to fall under two broad categories, and they both leave much to be desired. Old-school bodybuilders like Frank Zane and Vince Gironda- two of the greatest physiques of all time, in my opinion- would tell you that you’d look a lot more impressive by adding five to eight pounds of fat-free muscle mass than by slapping on 10 pounds of muscle with 20 pounds of belly marbling. Bigger and fatter is not an ideal bulking strategy.