Most diet plans are based around losing weight, but what should you do if you want to build muscle? Building muscle is probably the second most common supplication I get as a Glasgow personal trainer after weight loss. Conventional wisdom is to over eat for many weeks while weight training to bulk up before strictly dieting to strip away fat. Unfortunately long term over eating adds lots of fat and under eating costs you lots of muscle so you confine up taking 2 steps forward and 2 steps back. A better plan is to follow the feast and famine feeding cycle that shaped our evolution.
It is only recently that ample food supplies have been consistently available. For most of human history this was not the occasion and the body evolved to respond to times of feast and famine in ways that you can handle to build muscle. During the initial days of a famine you burn body fat before hormonal changes befall to protect our fat stores to help heed us through the famine. Famine also primes the body to respond aggressively to agile abundance of food to aid survival by prioritising the strength to defend against immediate threats ( predators ) over the fat stores intended to see you through subsequent famines. So excess calories are initially used to keep muscle fuel stores before being used to quickly build muscle.
After a few days the body stops building new muscle and stores accidental calories as fat.
To image this Swedish scientist Torbjorn Akerfeldt promotes 14 days on very low calories then 14 days on high calories. He found that cycling between famine and feast sees a fat / muscle loss ratio of 2: 1 during famine but a fat / muscle gain ratio of 2: 1 during feast, distant better the acknowledged bulk then mold plan. While this worked for me, and may be the best possibility from a practical perspective, the 14 day diet was very hard. It is much easier to sustain 7 days famine followed by 7 days feast long term. A 7 day cycle also eliminates the duration at the head of the feast when your body transitions to chiefly storing the unrequired calories as fat.
As the driving force behind feast and famine feeding is the flying changes in calorie intake achieving this should be your main concern. The balance of protein, carbohydrates and fats is not too important as long as the famine age intake is low enough to prime the muscle building response to the significantly higher intake during the feast turn.
