Building Your Bodybuilding Diet

Today I’m go to go through the basics of constructing a bodybuilding diet. Many new lifters I talk to are completely confused about how much food they should be eating to build muscle without gaining too much fat. I’m going to take the confusion out of creatine a diet right now by showing you how simple it is!


Step 1: how many calories do you need?
The first step to building your bodybuilding diet is calculating how many calories you need to build muscle. There are loads of calculators around the web to help you out, but my favorite is this BMR calorie calculator. That calculator provides the most accurate measurement of what you’re going to need.

So enter your details into that calculator to get your base calories. Now add 500 to that figure.

Example: calculator returns 2,850. You requirements to build muscle are 3,350

Step 2: protein/carbohydrate/fat ratios
Now you need to work out your daily protein, carbohydrate and fat requirements. Most agree that a ratio of 30/50/20 ratio is optimum for muscle growth. This may vary from person to person, but that’s what we’re going to work off here in this example.

The calculations:

Protein contains 4 calories per gram.
Carbohydrates contain 4 calories per gram.
Fat contains 9 calories per gram.

Protein: 30% of 3, 350 is 1,005 calories / 4 = 250g of protein required daily
Carbohydrates: 50% of 3,350 is 1675 calories / 4 = 420g of carbohydrates daily
Fat: 20% of 3,350 is 670 calories / 9 = 75g of fat daily

Step 3: splitting into meals
So from the above calculations we now know that we have the following daily requirements:

1.250g of protein
2.420g of carbohydrates
3.75g fat
The next step is to split these amounts into daily meals. You should aim to eat at least 6 meals per day for muscle growth. There are several reasons for this, but it’s out of the scope of this article.

Protein: 250g / 6 = 42g per meal
Carbohydrates: 420 / 6 = 70g per meal
Fat: 75g / 6 = 12.5g per meal

There you have it, each meal you eat needs to contain approx 42g of protein, 70g or carbohydrates and 12.5g fat. Now all you have to do is get familiar with the calories in foods so that you can easily plan your meals.