Sculpt Your Body With What You Eat
You have the power to sculpt your body with the foods you eat, as well as the type of exercises you do. Before I address how to sculpt your body with how you eat, let’s talk about how you train.
Sculpt Muscle by How You Train
“The more muscle your workout requires, the more muscle you will gain…”
While protein is very important for sculpting a fit body, supplementing without the proper training will not get you the results you want. How you train greatly determines what you store for energy and what you use for energy. With intense movements, your body will likely store more energy as muscle. Your body is smart. The more muscle your workout requires, the more muscle you will gain, or keep. – And don’t worry ladies, you won’t be a beef-cake bodybuilder, you will just look super fit. It takes a LOT of work to look like a man! 😉
On the contrary, if you are a marathon runner, you are more prone to burn both muscle and fat as energy, and store fat, because muscle is not needed as much for low to moderate intensity workouts. While running a marathon is quite grueling, it doesn’t require a lot of explosive power, it requires endurance. Of matter of fact, a runner’s body considers muscle as unnecessary added weight. However, fat is a good source of energy for long runs, so that is why your body is prone to storing fat. If a runner wants to maintain muscle, they need to pump up their muscles in the gym (and pump up protein) in addition to their running program to encourage their body to keep muscle.
Sculpt Muscle by How You Eat
Now that you understand the importance of how you train, let’s dive into your eating. As you’ve heard before, “you are what you eat”. Fat and carbs makes fat bodies. Protein make fit muscular bodies. That is why it is so important to get enough protein if you want to maintain, or add, more muscle mass. Your body is always burning calories from a combination of fats, carbs and protein. If you eat carbs and fats, but are low on protein, your body doesn’t just stop burning protein. It still burns protein, but it burns stored protein (muscle). The same goes for fat stores. If you are short on fat or carbs, your body will burn stored fat to turn it into the fuel it’s missing.
If you are like me, and don’t want your body to burn muscle, then you want to keep a steady stream of protein in your diet so your body can feed off that – and not feed off your precious hard-earned muscle. If you want to GAIN muscle, then you need to give your body more protein than it needs so it stores more protein (muscle). *Use the protein calculator, below, to learn how much protein you should get a day.
Just the same way our body stores fat and carbs as body fat when you eat too much of it, your body can store excess protein as well. However, you still have to watch overall calories if you don’t want to gain weight, because too many calories is still too many calories – and it can cause you to gain weight, whether it’s coming from muscle or fat. Understand, if you eat more calories than you burn, you WILL gain weight – whether it’s muscle weight or fat weight.
So, the trick to a lean muscular physique is to eat a low-calorie, low-fat, moderate-carb, high-protein diet. This will encourage your body to burn fat stores to reduce body fat, while storing (or maintaining) protein to sculpt muscle. 🙂
What’s Your Number?
Click HERE to use GNC’s Protein Calculator to help you decide how much protein should be in your diet.
Inspire Someone:
Bonnie Pfiester
Owner of Lift Vero and motivational "pfitness, pfood and pfaith" blogger in Vero Beach, Florida.
10 Comments
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Since the production of this oil contributed mostly to the medical therapy, the creation
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Michelle
My starting weight, 210lbs; I’m 2 weeks into eating and exercising for a healthier me 🙂 counting calories, carbs, protein etc on MyFitnessPal. Using the Protein calculator I know now that I need add 35 more grams of Protein to my diet 🙂
I also go to the gym 5x a week; 3x (30min weights + 1hr cardio on elliptical & upright bike) and 2x (1.5hrs of cardio). Cardio for me is on the elliptical(4.5rpm), upright bike (100rpm), or walking at a fast pace (3.5mph) on a track. I am considering purchasing a heart monitor for when I am weight training because Myfitnesspal doesn’t calculate calories burned during weight lifting 🙁 Do you think that the machines are calculating calories burned incorrectly even though I have entered in my weight and age and my heartrate is being monitored? Thanks 🙂
glutenfreemuscle
I followed the link and my protein number is 151.
Bonnie Pfiester
cool! 🙂
Stacy
The link to your protein calculator isnt’ working. 🙁
Bonnie Pfiester
thanks for letting me know! So weird! Everything looked right, but worpress was adding my blog address to it. I fixed it for ya!!!!
Stacy
Thanks!