6 WAYS TO EAT STRONG - Nutrition - Muscle and Fitness Hers

6 WAYS TO EAT STRONG

Looking to get stronger in the gym? These 6 nutritional principles are so essential that together they create the Muscle & Fitness Hers Nutrition Platform. Use them to build a diet that will send your strength skyrocketing

By Jordana Brown | Illustration by Andy Potts

1. Protein = Power

A recent study from the University of Connecticut (Storrs) compared the standard diet of 0.4 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight (what the Institute of Medicine deems an appropriate amount for the average person to eat), a strength athlete's diet of 0.8 gram per pound and a high-protein diet of 1.6 grams per pound. When subjects ate the high-protein diet, they had greater nitrogen balance, which is an indicator of how much protein is being stored in the body. And if that body belongs to someone engaged in a weight-training program, that protein gets stored as muscle.

Strong Advice: Eat a minimum of 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. For a 145-pound woman, that equals at least 145 grams of protein daily.

2. Feast on Fats

Okay, so you can't feast, per se, but adding a decent amount of certain fats to your diet has numerous benefits. For one thing, mono- and polyunsaturated fats are associated with cardiovascular health, but more important, new research indicates that strength-trained women use fat differently than men. It's no secret that women store fat more readily than men do, but according to a review of related research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, women actually burn fat more readily than men as well. Whereas our brothers over at Muscle & Fitness are always having to burn through their glycogen stores (the stored form of carbohydrate your muscles use for fuel) before triggering fat-burning, female bodies, it seems, will actually burn fat first to spare glycogen. This has major implications for what you, as a woman on a strength-training program, should eat. While sports nutritionists promote a high-carb intake for athletes, that's really ideal only for endurance athletes such as marathoners. For the purposes of gaining strength, however, the opposite is true. Strength athletes should, as the review says, "put less emphasis on a very high carbohydrate intake and more emphasis on quality protein and fat consumption," with the majority of your calories coming from lean protein and healthy fat sources. Furthermore, the heavier you train, the more pressure you put on your joints, and healthy fats are critical to joint health.

Strong Advice: Aim to get 20%—30% of your daily calories from healthy fat sources such as salmon, nuts (particularly walnuts), seeds and avocados. Keep saturated fat (found in dairy and meat products) to 10% or less of your daily calorie intake.

3. Carb Load

Yes, we did just tell you to emphasize protein and fat in your diet, but that doesn't mean you should cut out all carbohydrates. Even though your body will preferentially burn fat during workouts, that doesn't mean it won't burn through some of your glycogen, and you have to eat some carbs to replace it. In fact, carbs are an important part of a strength athlet's diet. Researchers at Loughborough University (England) found that when athletes ate slow-burning carbs for breakfast and lunch and then exercised, they burned more fat both throughout the day and during exercise and maintained lower insulin levels than those who ate fast-burning carbs. There are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part the carbs you eat should be of the slow-digesting variety—whole grains (brown rice, oatmeal, whole-wheat bread), legumes, sweet potatoes and fruit.

Strong Advice: Eat 1—1.5 grams of primarily slow-digesting carbohydrates per pound of bodyweight per day.

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