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Nutrition guide for beginners

Nutrition guide for beginners

So, you've just started strength training, want to build muscle and lose fat, and are trying to do everything as optimally as possible when it comes to nutrition.

However, this drive to do everything optimally is the undoing of many beginners and often leads to them not staying on the ball in the long term and, of course, not reaching their goals.

They take on far too much and make it unnecessarily complicated for themselves. After a few weeks, they don't want to do it anymore because it's too exhausting.

Start simple

The better alternative is to start SIMPLE and only complicate things when necessary. Once you have the nutrition basics down, then you can move on to the more advanced strategies.

It's like studying. You first learn the basics and complete your bachelor's degree, and THEN comes the master's degree. No one would think of cramming all the material from the bachelor's and master's degrees into one semester.

Start simple!

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have discipline as a strength training beginner. You HAVE to deal with the matter of nutrition if you want to be successful in the long run. But you don't have to think about optimizing the little details all day long if you already pay attention to the most important things.

Then, of course, the question arises: What are the most important things that you should consider in your diet as a beginner in the gym?

The most important thing is calorie balance. Then comes macronutrient ratio, followed by timing and frequency, micronutrients, and finally (least important) supplements. If you look through the articles on this blog, you'll find many that talk about exactly these key ideas when it comes to nutrition for muscle gain and/or fat loss.

Calorie Balance > Macronutrient Ratio > Timing & Frequency > Micronutrients > Supplements

As a beginner, should you now record your calories, macros, and micros, pay close attention to timing and frequency, and create the perfect supplement plan? No!

Because imagine the following situation: You tell a beginner that he should weigh everything from now on and enter it into his tracking app, but he has never even used a kitchen scale and doesn't yet know that low-fat cottage cheese is a good source of protein.

You tell him that at the end of the day, he must come to exactly 2500 cal, divided into 160g protein, 80g fat and 265g carbohydrates. He will look at you with big eyes and think to himself: Calories? Macronutrients? Tracking app? Kitchen scale? What do you want from me? At least that's how most beginners will feel.

Most beginners will be overwhelmed with tracking.

But the great thing is that as a beginner you don't actually need to do all of that to get very good results. You have so much potential in the beginning to build muscle and lose fat AT THE SAME TIME, even if you don't do everything right. This has been shown in many studies and has also been observed consistently in practice.

Of course, this is only true if you train smart and hard. For example, you don't have to reach a certain amount of calories exactly every day. As long as you don't eat way too many or way too few calories, everything is fine for now. As a beginner, you have a wide range of calories in which you can move.

You can build muscle and lose fat at the same time whether you're in a slight calorie deficit, in a surplus, or on maintenance calories.

It's similar with macro and micronutrients, timing and frequency, and supplements. Here, too, you have a large "error buffer" at the beginning. Enjoy the time with this error buffer. You'll never get ahead in this sport that easily again - as sad as that sounds.

In fact, the more advanced you are, the better you need to plan your diet in order to become even more advanced.

As an advanced athlete, you probably can't avoid, for example, targeted muscle building phases in a calorie surplus and targeted fat loss phases in a calorie deficit. In addition, you will need to pay very close attention to your macronutrient distribution, timing, and frequency, not to mention your micronutrients and supplements.

But as I said, everything in its own time, as long as you can also make sure that you can go through with it.

The more advanced you are, the better you need to plan your diet to become EVEN MORE advanced.

Three simple rules

We will now consider some relatively simple rules that you can follow as a beginner to improve your body composition with minimal effort. These rules are mainly to ensure that you do not eat far too many or far too few calories and are supplied as optimally as possible with protein and micronutrients.

The best thing about these rules is that they do not focus directly on going without specific foods. This is because this renunciation often occurs unconsciously without much effort if you follow positively formulated rules.

Let's move on to the three rules that are perfectly sufficient for the vast majority of beginners:

1. Every day, consume at least 0.8 g of protein per lb of body weight through foods that contain mainly protein. The 0.8 g is therefore NOT the total intake - but really only protein from foods such as meat, eggs, or low-fat cottage cheese.

2. Eat at least a pound of vegetables and 2 servings of fruit every day.

3. Eat as much as you want to until you feel full.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? It should be! Let's go through these main points in detail.

1. Every day, consume at least 0.8 g of protein per lb of body weight through foods that contain mainly protein.

Why pay attention to protein at all? Protein is definitely the most important macronutrient if you want to look leaner and/or more muscular. Protein serves as a building material for your muscles (but also for the skin, hair, fingernails, etc.) and is more satiating (filling) per calorie than carbohydrates or fats.

And why consume 0.8 g/lb from protein-heavy foods, instead of the recommended 1 g/lb in total? This may be more difficult to calculate at first glance, but it will be MUCH easier to track.

Because instead of tracking every gram of potato or every ml of milk, you track only a fraction of the food you eat. Due to the smaller amounts of protein in the non-tracked foods, you will then very safely reach the 1 g per pound of body weight in TOTAL.

For you, of course, this means that you have to find out which foods contain mainly protein and how much protein is in there. This is important. So look at the nutritional information on the back of the packaging and pay particular attention to the protein content.

Common foods that have a lot of protein are low-fat cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, meat, fish, eggs, and cheese. If you are vegan, then focus on foods like tofu, soy yogurt, peas, beans, lentils, seitan, meat substitutes, or high-protein bread.

Of course, you can also drink protein shakes or eat protein bars, but in the beginning it's best to try getting in your protein with "normal" foods first. This is not to say that shakes or bars are bad - not at all. But you should first learn how much protein is contained in the most common high-protein foods.

You won't learn that by eating bars or drinking shakes all the time. On the other hand, if you learn your high-protein foods well, you will also be equipped to make the right decisions in restaurants. There are usually no bars or shakes there, right? Unless you're talking about milkshakes!

It's best to take your phone, open a note-taking app, and after each meal write down approximately how many grams of protein you've eaten from these high-protein foods. This doesn't have to be completely accurate, but it should be close. By the last meal of the day, you should have gotten a total of at least .8 g per lb of body weight.

In this article we recommend using your note-taking app or a piece of paper to track your protein as a beginner. Of course, there are apps you can use like MyFitnessPal that are made specifically for tracking your diet, but these can complicate things if you are a beginner, and there's no need to use them at this point.

In the beginning you will probably have to look at the nutritional information on the packaging fairly often, but after a few weeks you will easily be able to remember the protein content of your go-to foods off the top of your head.

Let's try a small example: You weigh 150 lbs and accordingly aim to get at least 120 g of protein a day from protein sources (i.e. 0.8 g/lb times 150 lbs).

For breakfast, for example, you eat cereal with half a package of cottage cheese. Half a package usually has 250 g total, and that corresponds to 30g protein in the serving. You then enter this into your cell phone (or write it down on a piece of paper).

By the way, you don't even have to weigh the cottage cheese. This is because estimating how much you need to take from the package to have half in your cereal bowl is not difficult. You can even sweeten the cottage cheese with sweetener to make it taste better.

For the second meal, you go out to eat and order something to eat that has a piece of chicken breast that's about the size of your palm. That will probably weigh about 130g and will give you 30g of protein. You take your cell phone again and write down these 30g.

For the third meal, you take a Tupperware container with yogurt and fruit. You have half a container of yogurt left. This is usually 225g, and it contains about 25g of protein.

In total, you have already supplied 85 g of protein through protein sources during the day. Still, you are missing at least 35 g. But you'll easily get that at dinner (i.e. at your fourth and final meal).

For example, you could eat a large portion of beef with your vegetables and rice. This should give you at least 40 g of protein. You then come to 125 g protein just through the high-protein sources.

This will probably give you at least 160 g of protein in total if you also add the protein from all the other foods you ate that are not major sources of protein.

So you see, getting enough protein is no problem at all if you put a little thought into it.

A little tip for eating out: You can order a double portion of protein (e.g. in the form of meat) for a small extra charge almost everywhere. This makes sense in restaurants, where the standard protein portions are usually quite small.

2. Eat at least a pound of vegetables and 2 servings of fruit a day.

Why fruits and vegetables? Well, as you probably know: vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and fiber are super important for all metabolic processes in the body. You need them to be able to concentrate, to support muscle growth, for your immune system and your longevity, etc.

In addition, fruits and vegetables are usually quite satiating, much like protein, in this case because they are very voluminous and at the same time are relatively low in calories. Of course some fruits - say, strawberries - are less calorie dense than others - like bananas or avocados.

What could a sample day look like with these minimum recommendations? In the morning, you eat a large handful of raspberries and a diced tomato in your cereal. That's one serving of fruit and about 100 g of vegetables.

In the afternoon, you eat an apple and a red bell pepper cut into strips with your yogurt. That's one serving of fruit and about 150 g of vegetables. So at this point in the day you've already eaten a total of 2 servings of fruit and 250 g of vegetables.

You are missing another 250 g of vegetables before you can say you've fulfilled your goal for the day. You can eat this amount for dinner, for example, in the form of a frozen veggie mix. You can enter all of this into your notes app or write it down on a piece of paper, as with your protein.

3. Eat as much as you want until you are nicely satiated.

This may sound like a super simple rule, but sticking to it is not that easy. Nowadays, many people don't really know when they should stop eating.

Therefore, here is a little advice: The first spoonful gives you the best taste experience. For example, you eat a spoonful of rice, vegetables, and meat. Super delicious.

The second spoonful is also still relatively tasty - not quite as tasty as the first, but still quite tasty. The third spoon is again less tasty than the second and the 15th spoonful is actually no longer tasty at all.

On the contrary, you don't really feel like eating any more. This is the latest point at which you should stop eating. Why continue to eat? It's not doing you any good.

Sure, if you start eating dessert after your main course, then the first spoonful tastes pretty good again. Dessert always does, right?

Whether you should just give up dessert for good or not is a rather psychologically complex topic, which we do not want to go into in depth in this article.

Sometimes you may, for instance, choose to allow yourself dessert when your body fat percentage is quite low but go without dessert (at least in most cases) when your body fat percentage is too high. However, this is a complicated topic and is up to you at the end of the day.

In addition to the decline in enjoyment of the taste from spoon to spoon, your stomach also gradually stretches more the more you eat. At some point, this stretching is so strong that you will no longer benefit from another spoonful. That would simply be unpleasant.

So if you find that another spoonful doesn't really taste good at all, or if it just makes you uncomfortably full, stop eating.

Is the plate not quite empty and you'll have to throw something away if you don't finish it? Yes? Then throw something away. You won't save the world by following your parents' advice and always eating everything off your plate. And believe us: the weather tomorrow won't get any worse because of a bit of wasted food! Alternatively, just save the leftover food for another day. Leftovers can make a great meal when you're in a rush, after all!

So, what about the calories? They were not mentioned explicitly! That is correct. In most cases, a suitable amount of calories will result from following these rules. Always remember:

You can build muscle and lose fat at the same time as a beginner, whether you are in a slight calorie deficit, in a surplus, or on maintenance calories.

If you follow the rules in this article, you will probably either consume as many calories as you burn (i.e. eating at maintenance level) or even be in a slight deficit.

Why in a slight deficit? Well, look at what most people eat: many foods with a high calorie density that don't really fill you up (Nutella, white bread, sweets, etc.).

If you've been eating your fill of these foods up until now, then you'll most likely get full faster with fewer calories now due to the increased protein, vegetables, and fruits.

In addition, the third rule makes you even more careful to stop eating when your body signals you to stop.

What if the whole thing doesn't work for you and you don't build muscle and lose fat or even end up gaining fat when you don't want to? Then you can always try a more complicated approach that takes a bit more effort!

However, there is a good chance that the simple approach will work for you in the beginning and save you a lot of effort and a high risk of giving up on the whole thing.

It may well be that you make good progress with these simple rules for several years. If at some point you can't make any more progress, but still want to achieve your big goals, then it can of course make sense to pay closer attention to the calories and macros you eat every day, for example.

In any case, you'll need to pay closer attention if you want to be in top shape by a certain date (e.g. for a photo shoot, a vacation, or even more so for a bodybuilding competition).

Conclusion

As a beginner, focus on the essentials of nutrition to help yourself stay on the ball in the long run. For example, you can follow 3 relatively simple rules and you will probably achieve very good results in the first months or even years.

The first rule is to get at least 0.8 g of protein per lb of body weight every day through foods that contain mainly protein. The second rule is to eat a pound of vegetables and 2 servings of fruit every day, and the third is to eat until you are comfortably satiated.

Do that for a few months or years - as long as it works - and if at some point you realize that you're no longer getting anywhere, then switch - if it's worth it to you - to a more complex approach.

But until then: Keep it simple!

If you want to record, evaluate, and optimize your training, download the Alpha Progression app here.