Eat Big to Get Big? Why You Can’t Eat to Grow

When it comes to diet and exercise, I have made a great many mistakes over the years. Perhaps the biggest was spending far too much of my late teens and early twenties carrying around too much fat.

My main goal was to gain as much muscle as humanly possible. And I believed (wrongly as it turns out) that doing so involved nothing more than eating a vast amount of food.

I’d been told that I needed to eat big to get big, so that’s exactly what I did.

Eat Big to Get Big

As a result, I ended up gaining a lot of weight, and did a very thorough job of convincing myself that a) most of this weight consisted of muscle and b) the day would soon come when I would strip away the fat to reveal the Herculean physique I’d been working on all these years.

In truth, I was deluding myself on a grand scale.

If you’re carrying around a decent amount of muscle, adding a layer of fat can create the illusion of size, especially when you’re wearing clothes.

People may say that you’re looking bigger, which is always nice to hear.

And you might feel that warm glow of satisfaction when you step on the bathroom scales and see your weight going up every week.

But what’s the point if you’re just getting fat?

Contrary to all this “eat big to get big” nonsense out there, you can’t increase the rate of muscle hypertrophy simply by stuffing yourself with food.

Someone in their first few months of training is going to build muscle relatively quickly, and will need a diet to support that rate of growth. But once you’ve moved past the beginner stages of training, the speed at which you gain muscle will have slowed down.

All of which means you’re not going to need to eat as much food.

Extra energy that isn’t used to fuel your workouts, to help you recover from those workouts, or to support the muscular remodeling process that occurs in the hours and days after training, will just end up stored as fat.

RELATED: How Long Does It Take to Build Muscle?

Why You Can’t Eat to Grow

What you do in the gym is only part of the story when it comes to building muscle. Without enough food, much of your efforts in the gym will go to waste. But that doesn’t give you a license to go and eat anything and everything in sight.

There’s an upper limit on the amount of nutrients you can take in and turn into muscle. If you’re currently eating below this upper limit, then you’ll build muscle faster by increasing your nutrient intake.

But once you’ve “maxed out” your rate of muscle gain, simply adding more calories won’t automatically lead to a faster rate of growth. No matter how much food you shovel into your mouth, you can’t force feed muscle growth.

Let’s say that the amount of energy required to keep you alive, fuel activity and maximize the rate at which you gain muscle is 3000 calories per day. But, you’re only eating 2000 calories per day. In this case, taking in an extra 1000 calories will lead to a faster rate of muscle growth.

But just because those extra 1000 calories have helped you gain muscle faster doesn’t mean that doubling up on the calories is going to result in muscle being built twice as fast. That is, bumping up your calorie intake still further to 4000 calories won’t make your muscles grow any faster.

In other words, there is a sweet spot to be found between “not enough” and “too many” calories. Find that sweet spot, and you’ll be able to maximize your rate of muscular growth while minimizing the amount of fat that’s gained.

Think of your diet as permissive in the sense that it allows the muscle-building stimulus delivered in the gym to manifest itself as an increase in muscle mass over time.

“Training is the actual stimulus while nutrition is only permissive to muscle growth,” explains strength and muscle coach Dr Eric Helms.

“What do I mean by permissive? I mean that nutrition can permit the growth of muscle tissue but it is not the root cause. That is the function of training. Eating to grow is a misnomer. All you can do is eat to provide the ideal environment to permit growth. You can train to grow, but you cannot truly eat to grow. The reason I’m harping on this semantic difference is because this misunderstanding has led many down the path of putting on unnecessary body fat way too fast.”

How to Bulk without Getting Fat

A diet designed to maximize your rate of muscle growth requires eating more calories than your body needs to maintain its weight. That means being in a calorie surplus, rather than the calorie deficit required to lose fat.

Although some of the energy required to fuel hypertrophy can be provided by stored fat (which is why it’s possible to build muscle in a calorie deficit), muscle protein synthesis – which is what needs to happen to make your muscles bigger – tends to be greater when your diet provides a surplus of energy.

What does that mean exactly?

Let’s say, for example, that you’re able to maintain your current weight on a daily calorie intake of 2200 calories per day. You decide that you want to bulk up, and increase your daily calorie intake by around 500 calories per day.

Those additional 500 calories provided by your diet represent a calorie surplus.

The exact size of the calorie surplus required to fuel muscle growth with minimal spillover into body fat is going to vary from person to person. But in most cases, it’ll be somewhere between 300 and 500 calories per day.

Eating more will lead to weight being gained more quickly, but there’s a good chance that much of that weight will be in the form of fat rather than muscle.

That is, once your calorie maintenance requirements have been met, a bulking diet that provides a calorie surplus in excess of 500 calories per day is unlikely to lead to muscle being gained more quickly.

Protein

Next, set your protein intake at around 0.7 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. If you weigh 170 pounds, for example, your daily protein intake would be around 119 grams of protein per day (170 x 0.7 = 119).

Ideally, you’ll get most of your daily protein intake from food, such as eggs (whole eggs rather than just egg whites are fine), fish (high-fat, cold-water fish such as salmon and mackerel are also good sources of omega-3 fatty acids), chicken breast, milk, cottage cheese, greek yogurt, ground beef, turkey and so on. 

If you find it difficult to reach your daily protein target, supplement your diet with 1-2 protein shakes each day. All you need to do is take 1-2 scoops of whey protein powder (or a similar high-quality source) and mix it with water. 

A protein shake will typically provide 20-30 grams of protein, and represents a quick and easy way to get the extra protein you need to maximize muscle growth.

Fat

Fat can vary from 20 to 40 percent of your total calorie intake. Each gram of fat contains around 9 calories. For someone eating 3000 calories per day, that comes to between 67 and 133 grams of fat per day.

There’s no reason why your fat intake has to be the same every day. Some days your fat intake might be a little higher, others a little lower. But on average, aim to keep it somewhere between 20 and 40% of total calories.

If you find it difficult to eat enough calories, snack on high-fat foods like walnuts, almonds, peanut butter and so on.

Carbs

Once protein and fat are taken care of, the rest of your calories should come from carbs, such as pasta, rice, sweet potatoes, oats, apples, bananas and so on. As well as carbs, these foods provide your body with plenty of vitamins, minerals and other nutritional benefits.

The timing of your carbohydrate intake relative to your workouts isn’t as important as was once believed, for the reasons I describe here.

Nor do you need to worry that eating carbohydrate after some arbitrary time of day makes it more likely to be converted into fat.

As long as you adhere to a few basic dietary guidelines, the way you distribute your calories over the course of the day can be left to personal preference, and won’t have a great deal of impact on your results one way or the other.

Final Thoughts

The eat big to get big approach makes sense if you’re skinny and tend to burn through a lot of calories each day.

But for a lot of people, particularly those who have a hard time gaining muscle, it can mean putting on three or four pounds of fat for every pound of muscle that’s gained. This will leave you facing a lengthy diet for just a few pounds of muscle gained. 

The last thing you want is to have a large proportion of your weight gain come from fat, and then have to waste time and energy getting rid of it all.