"The Shredded Chef" by Michael Matthews

• You must eat properly to see good results from working out.
• Muscles can’t grow unless the body has the right nutrients to repair the damage caused by lifting weights.
• Your body can’t lose fat unless you make it operate at just the right deficit of calories.
• Recipes for getting big are going to be higher-calorie meals with a fair amount of carbs and fats, and they’ll help you reach your daily calorie needs for building muscle.
• Recipes for getting lean are lower-calorie meals with little carbs and fats, which is vital for dieting successfully.
• In order to lose fat, you must keep your body burning more energy than you’re feeding it, and the energy potential of food is measured in calories.
• In order to gain muscle, your body needs a surplus of energy to repair and rebuild itself (along with plenty of protein).
• A calorie is a measurement of the potential energy found in food, and your body burns quite a bit of energy every day.
• Use the following formula to determine how much you should be eating to maintaining your current weight, while ensuring you have plenty of energy for your workouts.
• Eat 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day.
• Eat 1.5 grams of carbs per pound of bodyweight per day.
• Eat 1 gram of healthy fats per 4 pounds of body weight per day.
• This amount of food works for making slow, steady muscle and strength gains without any fat added along the way.
• If your priority is to gain muscle, then you need to add about 500 calories per day to your “maintenance” diet.
• If you’re trying to lose fat, then you need to subtract about 500 calories per day to your “maintenance” diet.
• It’s also important that you consume high-quality calories. Junk food calories, such as white bread, pastas, chips, juice and soda, will make you look and feel like crap, while good calories, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins, will keep you in tip-top shape.
• So, in order to get the most out of your workouts, you need to eat enough protein. And that doesn’t mean just eating a lot after working out. It means having protein 4-6 times per day with a few hours in between each meal.
• There are two main sources of protein out there: whole food protein and supplement protein.
• The best forms of whole food protein are chicken, turkey, lean red meat, fish, eggs, and milk.
• Protein supplements are powdered or liquid foods that contain protein from various sources, such as whey (a liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained in the process of making cheese), egg, and soy--the three most common sources of supplement protein.
• Now, there are a few things you should know about eating protein. First is that your body can only digest and absorb so much in one sitting. According to various studies, this ranges between 30-60 grams depending on your metabolism and digestive tract.
• Another thing to know about protein is that different proteins digest at different speeds, and some are better utilized by the body than others.
• NPU and digestion speeds are important to know because you want to rely on high-NPU proteins to meet your daily protein requirement, and you want a quick-digesting protein for your post-workout meal, and a slow-digesting protein for your final meal before you go to bed (to help you get through the fasting that occurs during sleep).
• In order to meet your daily protein requirements, here are your choices:
• whole food proteins
• lean meats (beef, pork, chicken, and turkey)
• fish
• eggs
• vegetarian sources
• protein supplements
• egg
• whey
• casein
• Fats are the densest energy source available to your body. Each gram of fat contains over twice the calories of a gram of carbohydrate or protein.
• Keep your intake of saturated fats relatively low (below 10% of your total calories).
• If a fat is a solid at room temperature, it’s a saturated fat.
• Completely avoid trans fats.
• And food that contains “hydrogenated oil” or “partially hydrogenated oil” likely contains trans fats, so just don’t eat it.
• Get at least half of your daily fat from unsaturated fats.
• If a fat is liquid at room temperature, it’s an unsaturated fat.
• Regardless of what type of carbohydrate you eat--broccoli or apple pie--the body breaks it down into two substances: glucose and glycogen.
• Glucose is commonly referred to as “blood sugar”, and it’s an energy source used by your cells to do the many things they do. Glycogen is a substance stored in the liver and muscles that can be easily converted to glucose for immediate energy.
• The glycemic index is a numeric system of ranking how quickly carbohydrates are converted into glucose in the body. Carbs are ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 depending how they affect blood sugar levels once eaten. A GI rating of 55 and under is considered “low GI”, 56 to 69 is medium, and 70 and above is high on the index. A “simple” carb is one that converts very quickly (is high on the glycemic index), while a “complex” carb is one that converts slowly (is low on the glycemic index).
• Building muscle requires that you eat a substantial amount of carbs, while dieting to lose weight requires that you reduce carbs.
• Eat carbs in the medium-high range of the glycemic index (60-90 is a good rule of thumb) about 30 minutes before you exercise, and again within 30 minutes of finishing your workout.
• All other carbs you eat should be in the middle or at the low end of the glycemic index (60 and below is a good rule of thumb).
• If you’re unsure about a carb you like, look it up to see where it falls on the glycemic index. If it’s above 60, just leave it out of your meals that aren’t immediately before or after working out.
• Fruit juices, however, are another story. While they may seem like an easy way to get in your daily fruits, they are actually not much more than tasty sugar water.
• Fruits widely recognized as the healthiest are apples, bananas, blueberries, oranges, grapefruit, strawberries, and pineapples.
• Vegetables often recommended as the healthiest are asparagus, broccoli, spinach, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions, and eggplant.
• You should be eating protein every 3-5 hours. You never want to go more than 5 hours without eating protein.
• Much of your daily carbohydrates should come before and after training, when your body needs them most.
• It’s also important when dieting to lose weight to not eat carbs within several hours of going to bed.
• So, as a general rule, when you’re dieting to lose weight, don’t eat any carbs within 4-5 hours of bedtime. You should only consume lean proteins after dinner.
• Your body’s ability to digest, transport, and absorb nutrients from food is dependent upon proper fluid intake.
• Too much sodium in the body causes water retention (which gives you that puffy, soft look) and it can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease.
• If you follow a strict diet and exercise, you can expect to lose 1-2 pounds per week.
• So don’t think cheat days, think cheat meals--meals where you eat more or less anything you want (and all other meals of the week follow your meal plan).
• When you’re eating to stay lean and gain muscle slowly, two cheat meals per week is totally fine. When you’re dieting to lose weight, you can have one cheat meal per week.
• If you slept eight hours and ate your last meal five hours before going to bed, your body has gone thirteen hours without food. If you were to wake up and skip breakfast, waiting another five hours for the noon lunch, the fasting period stretched to eighteen hours.
• During the starvation period of sleep, your body goes into a catabolic state (breaking muscle down), and the longer you extend it, the worse the situation gets. You want to end this as soon as possible, and you do it by eating food.
• The bottom line is that lean beef is an awesome testosterone-boosting muscle-building source of protein, and you should absolutely include it in your diet.
• Fish is a terrific, healthy source of protein.
• Carbohydrates are a vital source of energy for your body.
• A good source of slow-burning, low-fat carbohydrates are whole grains such as wheat, brown rice, quinoa, oats, and barley. What are whole grains exactly? They’re grains that contain all the essential parts and naturally occurring nutrients of the entire grain seed.
• Protein shakes are a great way to help meet daily nutritional requirements, and are especially good for your post-workout meal due to fast absorption of the protein and high-glycemic carbs.
• You should stock up on healthy snacks such as low-fat cottage cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables, low-fat or fat-free yogurt, nuts, and granola.