Nutrition rules

Bodybuilding - No-Nonsense Nutrition Rules

1. Take The Time To Eat Breakfast In The Morning.
Breakfast should include complex carbohydrates and clean protein. Essentially, complex carbohydrates provide energy and the protein ensures that the body has material readily available for rebuilding tissues.

Combining the complex carbohydrate with a protein stabilizes blood sugar levels and stokes the metabolism. Fail to provide your body with the energy that it requires to function properly and it will feed off of your muscle tissue and ultimately hamper your metabolism. A good combination here is a bowl of oatmeal, eggs, grapefruit and a cup of coffee.

2. Eat Five To Six Small Meals Per Day.
This one requires some planning. The "meals" referred to consist of a protein, complex carbohydrate, and a fibrous carbohydrate. Some good combinations include:
Chicken/Brown rice/Broccoli
Tuna/Medium baked potato/Green beans
Lean cuts of beef (once a week)/Sweet potato/Salad
Salmon/Quinoa/Asparagus

3. Eat Every Three Hours.
This also requires some planning. Eating every three hours keeps the blood sugar/insulin levels stable throughout the day, controls cravings, prevents binging, reduces fat storage and keeps the metabolism burning hot.

Since you hear the word "metabolism" quite frequently in conjunction with nutrition, let's take a quick look at what it means. Basically, "metabolism" is the rate at which your body burns through food. When you hear that someone has a "fast metabolism," this simply means that the person's body is efficiently using the calories derived from food whether active or at rest.

Here is the thing; eating frequently makes you burn more calories. On the contrary, missing meals immediately slows the metabolism, triggers the body's starvation response and thus sounds the death knell for fat burning.