Bodybuilding Nutrition - Lee Labrada Talks About Bodybuilding Nutrition, Part 2

CS: Now, everyone knows that eating every two to three hours is incredibly time-consuming. It involves a lot of planning and preparation, and then you must transport your meals with you wherever you go. Some bodybuilders go so far as to carry a cooler bag of food with them…

LL: In fact, I do that myself. My wife will cook a week’s worth of food on the weekends, and then she will individually bag the individual portions like the chicken breasts and the potatoes and the rice and beans, and so forth. Then we will put them in the refrigerator so that I can just grab the prerequisite number of meals at the beginning of a day, and put them into my cooler along with some fruit, Lean Body Bars and Lean Body Ready to Drink Shakes (RTD’s) Then, I’m off to the races. Planning is essential if you want to be to comply with your bodybuilding diet.

CS: So what if the average bodybuilder doesn’t have the time to prepare all of that food? What can he or she do to comply with their diet?

LL: Well, I think the idea is to find a program that you can live with, something that is quick and easy. I think that any bodybuilder in the morning would have time for a bowl of oatmeal and a protein drink, especially if it’s a ready to drink protein shake – you just open it and drink it. Incorporate a banana into this meal and you have a great breakfast. We also make a great breakfast MRP shake called Lean Body Breakfast.

Midmorning, you can have a protein bar and a piece of fruit. And at lunchtime, you can hit a restaurant and get a chicken sandwich and a baked potato along with a small salad or something of that nature.

In the mid afternoon just as in the midmorning, a protein bar and a piece of fruit or a RTD protein shake or perhaps a cup of cottage cheese with a granola bar. You know, these things are easy to pack and take with you, or easy to pick up at a grocery store or a convenience store or deli.

In my book The Lean Body Promise I even show people how to eat at fast food restaurants if that is what they want to do. Adhering to a bodybuilding diet is possible! The truth is, you can eat at a Burger King, Kentucky fried chicken, a McDonald’s if you know exactly what to order. Obviously, it’s not as good as having a sit-down dinner with freshly prepared whole foods, but it will do in a pinch.

In addition to that, keeping a cooler full of ready to drink shakes is a lifesaver in terms of getting your protein every three hours. Obviously that’s not going to take care of your complex carb intake, but you can have some sweet potatoes or potatoes that you’ve baked and wrapped and keep them in the cooler for easy eating.

CS: Would you recommend using a protein blend supplement throughout the day with your meals?

LL: I think that’s a good idea because with a protein blend you have a combination of both fast-acting proteins – such as the whey protein component – but you also have the slower digested proteins, which tend to release more slowly over a period of hours, such as the casein component of the milk proteins. So, here’s the take away: a protein blend is ideal for muscle building support throughout the day. Whey protein is really best suited when you need a quick shot of amino acids, which from my perspective is limited to right after the workout. For the rest of the day you’re better off with a protein blend like that found in ProV60 or Lean Body RTD’s.

For these products we use protein complexes, protein blends, for the very reason that they’re functional foods – foods that bodybuilders can depend on day in and day out to provide long-lasting support throughout the day. And it’s not just about muscle growth, but also about preserving muscle mass. The anti-catabolic effects of protein blends are due to the slow-releasing casein component.