A Science-Based Guide to Recovery for Gaining Muscle Mass
By: Keenan Eriksson
Tags: Recovery, Health, Biohacking, Fitness, Keto

Recovery Category 3: Nutrition

This wouldn’t be much of a fitness article if I didn’t tell you how I eat. The fact is, exercise alone will not create results. You’ve got to be eating right to support your body in this process.

Now, this topic is both the most simple and the most complex. It’s simple in that I personally only followed one diet during this exercise program. It’s complex because I followed a modified version of the oft-misunderstood ketogenic diet.

I personally do a ketogenic diet with 200 grams of carbs in my evening meal. This diet takes advantage of the muscle-gain effects of ketosis while keeping my glycogen stores high from the nightly carbs.

I also ate carbs more freely on weekends.

Keto is a big subject, and there are many ways to do it wrong. Also, even though this is the diet I chose to adhere to during my training program, it may not be the best for you.

Because of that, instead of talking about keto, I’m going to instead discuss a set of guidelines I follow for any diet when trying to gain muscle:

1. I eat real food

I personally believe that 90% of the success of diets is not what they have you eat, but what they have you stop eating.

People love to bash the newly popular carnivore diet, whereby adherents eat only meat and animal products. But, though the research is sparse, many people notice incredible benefits from this all-meat diet. Tribes throughout history have subsisted on solely animal-based diets, so it’s not exactly a new thing, but I suspect there is another effect that is contributing to these benefits.

They stopped eating all the other crap.

Think about it: How often do you eat something that has 10 or more ingredients that sound like lab chemicals or construction materials?

This is why I think the best first step for anyone who is trying to improve their nutrition is to start eating real, whole foods.

Robb Wolf of The Paleo Podcast says it well: If it didn’t have a face, don’t eat it. Now, obviously plants don’t have faces, but the key to this phrase is to get you to think of eating only things that were recently alive.

Eat plants that look like they are still plants and eat meat.

Don’t eat partially hydrogenated packaged foods, filled with weird ingredients like ammonium sulfate or isinglass.

2. I eat a lot of food

One of the best nutrition tips I’ve ever heard is the three-part mantra: Eat real food. Not too much. Mainly vegetables.

This mantra is great in that it promotes eating things that are natural and meant to go into your body from an evolutionary standpoint, while also getting the well-proven benefits of calorie restriction (eating not too much) and the nutritional power of many leafy green vegetables.

However, when you are trying to build muscle, you need to modify this mantra just a little bit. Instead of restricting your calories, you actually want to increase them.

Building muscle requires, to some extent, a calorie surplus, as well as adequate protein.

Now, personally, I don’t like counting calories, but for the duration of this exercise program, just try not to ever be hungry. If you feel hungry, you are not eating enough.

This is where a keto or low-carb diet can be beneficial, as fats are high-calorie food sources that will help you eat less often. If you go the other way and stick with a higher-carb diet, just try to stick with healthy sources of carbs.

It can be difficult to get high calories from carbs only eating whole vegetables as your food source, however, tubers can really change the game.

I recently discovered, and subsequently fell in love with the Japanese Sweet Potato. These things taste sweet like a yam, but have the texture and consistency of a flaky, chunky regular potato.

Bake ’em in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half, then drown ’em in coconut oil, and you’ve got one of the most delicious sources of healthy carbs I have found to date.

3. I mainly eat lean meat and fats from vegetables

Most of the meat sold in stores here in the U.S. has poor fat composition. Due to the high-grain diet, which is often unnatural for these animals, their fat has high amounts of inflammatory Omega-6 fat and low amounts of Omega-3.

To avoid getting this same situation in my own body, even though I do the high-fat ketogenic diet, I only eat lean, low-fat meat cuts. Then I get my dietary fat from vegetable sources, especially from extra virgin olive oil and avocados.

This extends into simply eating a lot of vegetables in general. A very common day for me is to eat a large, fake “chicken confit” meal consisting of a high amount of grapeseed oil, bok choy, which is a form of oriental cabbage that increases testosterone, and lean chicken breast.

At dinner, when I am restoring my muscle glycogen by adding carbs, I’ll do a sous vide chicken dinner with dinosaur kale and a large Japanese sweet potato. I lather the chicken with Primal Kitchen Avocado Mayonnaise and douse the potato with coconut oil.

During the day I might throw in some snacks in the form of macadamia nuts, or Wild Planet Sardines.

If you can stomach it, grass-fed, grass-finished (do not get any other kind) beef liver is one of the most nutritionally dense foods on the planet, and I try to eat it at least once a week. If you can’t stand the taste, there are some great recipes for making it more palatable using apple cider vinegar or lemon.

Bonus: I do a modified ketogenic diet

The ketogenic diet has been shown in studies to spare the amino acid leucine, which leads to increased muscle gains during weight training compared to high carb diets.

As I mentioned earlier, keto is poorly understood by many people, so I really can’t give you enough info to start keto in this guide alone. However, you may know already that I have written an extensive article on the ketogenic diet already that is posted here on Better Humans.

To use keto for this purpose, and truly follow my personal training plan, go read my guide at: Myths and Mistakes of the Ketogenic Diet, but apply my rules here.

The only difference in what the keto guide suggests and what I do for muscle building is that I don’t restrict calories, and I eat 200 grams of carbs from Japanese sweet potatoes with dinner.

This is so I have enough calories to gain muscle without injury and so that I have enough muscle glycogen (which is just sugar stored in your muscles) for high-intensity exercise that cannot be supported by fat as a fuel source.

You don’t have to do keto as long as you follow the three tips I mentioned here, but I like it better personally.