Episode 27: Tips for Healthy Eating While in a Bulk

Trainer Tips

Jun 12

You don’t have to eat a ton of junk food to meet your daily calorie goal while bulking.

Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast! I'm Jayd Harrison (@Jaydigains), a personal trainer and wellness coach. I created this podcast to share helpful tips to help you make gains in your fitness journey 💪

Let's talk about the importance of keeping that calorie surplus in check for muscle building. In this episode of the Coaching Corner podcast, I'm diving into the impact of good nutrition on muscle building and fat loss. It's all about fueling your body right to achieve those goals.

In this episode, I share tips for avoiding the pitfalls of "dirty bulking," which involves resorting to unhealthy, processed foods to meet high-calorie targets. Instead, I give tips for adding nutrient-dense options (like avocados, nuts, seeds, and olive oil).

For more information on my content and services, check out jaydharrisonfitness.com.

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(00:00):
Nutrition is something that we have to pay attention to and be careful of all day, every day, multiple times a day, right? What we put into our body, the fuel that we give our system is going to impact everything else.

(00:24):
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and we talk a lot about fat loss in my twitch streams and on this podcast. But today's episode mainly focuses on tips for eating healthy while trying to build muscle in a bulk phase. By bulking, we just mean prioritizing building muscle, and in order to build muscle, we need to be eating a calorie surplus. However, sometimes people have difficulty eating a calorie surplus while also sticking to a healthy diet and eating nutrient dense foods. So today's episode is all about how to navigate the different phases of your diet, whether you're prioritizing muscle gains or if you're prioritizing fat loss by continuing to focus on eating nutrient dense foods. I offer this information in contrast to what many people often do, which is called a dirty bulk, where they just eat anything in sight and end up actually gaining much more fat than muscle. So if you are interested in building muscle without putting on a whole lot of fat, this is a great episode to listen to. As always, make sure to give me a follow at Twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you would like to participate in my fitness live streams on Tuesdays, you can also join my email list at jaydigains.com or jaydharrisonfitness.com to get notified anytime new products and services drop. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.

(01:47):
It's always a good idea to go back to the basics and think about how we should be eating. Because many training programs, you'll be doing the same routine for at least six weeks, right? Four to six weeks at least. So you've got your routine so you can track your progress, add more reps, add more weight over time. Your training program is something that changes and your body responds to on a really slow scale, right? We build muscle pretty slowly, fat burns pretty slowly as well. However, nutrition is something that we have to pay attention to and be careful of all day, every day, multiple times a day, right? What we put into our body, the fuel that we give our system is going to impact everything else and it impacts everything else on a pretty quick basis, right? If you have a day where you eat a bunch of junk food and you don't drink a whole lot of water, you're immediately going to feel bloated.

(02:45):
You're probably going to feel more inflammation than you normally do, so you'll be more achy. You will notice that you look more bloated, that has a pretty quick turnaround, and then maybe the next day you get your stuff together. You eat more protein, you eat more fruits and veggies, you drink lots of water, and then your body pushes that extra water weight out really quickly. And then also, if you start eating clean, eating more fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds, fresh meat, dairy, eggs, that kind of thing, when you focus on eating whole foods, your energy levels can turn around pretty quickly. Within 24 hours, you notice that you're feeling better. So what you eat has a pretty quick impact on your body, how you feel, but it also, the gains that you make, right? If you're not eating right, that's going to slow down your gains significantly to the point where it doesn't even matter what you do in the gym.

(03:49):
It doesn't matter how hard you train. If you're not feeding your body the fuel that it needs and it doesn't have the building blocks that it needs to build muscle or the calories that it needs to burn fat or build muscle, then you're going to experience very slow change in your body. If not, no change at all or the worst, which is your progress goes backwards. So when you're trying to think of your fitness journey, you can't neglect the importance of how you eat. And just like your training program needs to be focused around what your goals are, right? If you're trying to get strong, then you should be doing strength training program. If you are trying to build up your muscular endurance, then you should be doing a program that has lots of high volume and cardiovascular type of exercise in it. Your diet also needs to support whatever your fitness goal is.

(04:43):
And generally speaking, on a macro scale, on a big scale, we usually center change our diets around. Depending on whether we are prioritizing building muscle or whether we are prioritizing burning fat, we're going to eat slightly differently depending on whether we're trying to build muscle or whether we are trying to burn fat. And notice that it's kind of like a one or the other. You can technically speaking, do both at the same time under a few specific circumstances. One, when you're just getting started in the gym or just getting started on your fitness journey. If you are not used to eating healthy foods, if you're not used to exercising, you can experience both muscle building and burning fat pretty quickly within the first three to six months of your new program. So you might see rapid changes in terms of how much weight you can use on your exercises or how many reps you can do.

(05:45):
And then also in terms of the scale, you can burn fat really quickly. Eventually though most people run into the point where their slow down and it becomes harder to make progress in either direction towards muscle building or towards fat loss, right? And part of the reason why this happens is our bodies are they're smart machines, so they are adapting to the stimulus that you've been giving it or giving them. So we have been eating a certain number of calories for an extended period of time. We have been doing a certain type of exercise that initially it wasn't used to for an extended period of time. Your body is going to get more efficient at doing those things and get more efficient with the number of calories that you're eating and the amount of protein that you're eating. So your body is always trying to bring itself to homeostasis because homeostasis is safe.

(06:43):
If you're in the wild and you have unpredictable food sources, your body doesn't want to continue burning fat on low calorie intake for an extended period of time, it's eventually going to slow your whole system down. That way you don't eventually reach a point where you have no more tissue left to burn and you die, right? So your body is going to adapt to the stimulus that you're giving it, which is why I like to have my clients train in like chunks of six weeks, six to 12 weeks at a time, whether we're working on fat loss or muscle building for that six to 12 weeks because your body is eventually going to adapt and bring itself back to homeostasis where making changes gets harder from that point on. So we have to change something about what we're doing every six to 12 weeks in order to keep the body progressing, whether that's fat loss or muscle building.

(07:39):
So you reach a point, everybody reaches a point where you need to put a focus on one or the other if you've noticed that your body isn't changing as quickly as you would like. And that's why a lot of people, most especially bodybuilders or people who do bodybuilding style training will alternate their nutrition in blocks of fat loss focus, which is a lot of times called a diet or cut where you're cutting calories trying to cut fat, or they will be in a muscle building focus phase, which is also called a bulk where you're trying to build muscle, you're putting more calories into your body. And how we eat in those two different phases is slightly different. Regardless of whether you're bulking or cutting, whether you're on a diet or you're focusing on muscle building, you should continue to eat a nutrient dense diet, okay?

(08:36):
Regardless of how many calories you're eating, you need to focus on giving your body lots of vegetables, lots of whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds, fresh meat if you are an omnivore, if you eat meat, fresh meat, fresh fish, eggs, dairy, and we to minimize the amount of processed, highly processed food, those packaged foods, the foods that are high in sodium, high in fat, high in sugars, and low in the stuff that our bodies need. We need to give our bodies vitamins and minerals, these nutrients our bodies need, even if you are trying to bulk, okay? Because remember that muscle building is part of our body's immune system response. And so the same advice applies to keeping that system strong and effective as the advice for just avoiding getting sick, right? Which is eat your vegetables, eat your fruit, high nutrient foods. So regardless of the number of calories you're eating, regardless of whether you're focusing on building muscle or burning fat, try to focus on the majority of the food that you eat being nutrient dense.

(09:43):
I say this because some people like to do what's called a dirty bulk, and some people even recommend dirty bulking, which is odd to me, but I as a personal trainer, cannot recommend a dirty bulk. And a dirty bulk is when people are focusing on building muscle. And in a muscle building phase, your goal is to eat a calorie surplus eating more calories than what your body normally spends. That way your body can use those extra calories to build muscle. So some people will do what's called a dirty bulk where they're just eating whatever they want and their diet will include all kinds of stuff. They're not trying to eat nutrient dense, healthy foods. They're just eating lots of processed stuff, lots of junk food, lots of fast food, fried food, the types of foods that we normally caution people against eating for health reasons.

(10:38):
So even if you are trying to eat a calorie surplus, that does not mean that you get it passed to eat whatever the fuck you want. Most of the time, you want to continue getting your body those nutrient dense foods. And yes, nutrient dense foods do tend to be less calorie dense, but that's not always the case. There are plenty of nutrient dense foods or there are plenty of calorie dense and nutrient dense foods that you can use to help your body to reach your calorie goal while not putting stuff into your body that's going to ultimately have a negative impact on your health. So if you have a high calorie intake requirement while you're in a muscle building phase, say you are a really tall guy, you've got a high body weight and you're trying to add three to five pounds of muscle, so some of these guys you'll be looking at and they've got their calorie recommended calorie intake might be as much as 4,000 calories a day.

(11:39):
I actually have a client who's a giant, and when he's bulking, he needs to eat 4,000, 5,000 calories a day, and that's just so that his body can add on a little bit of muscle, right? It takes a lot of calories to maintain and to build new muscle. And so sometimes people who have those high calorie intake requirements can find themselves eating a ton of processed food, fast food, fried food, and then they end up in a place where they don't feel very good, their workouts feel like trash. It eventually will catch up to you, and then your blood fat levels, you put your heart at risk, right? With lots of saturated fats and your diet, and you also can put yourself at risk of developing diabetes as well, because even though exercise can help regulate your blood insulin levels, if that's the majority of what you're eating, you can put yourself at risk of so many things.

(12:44):
So we want to make sure that even when you're in a bulk are eating nutrient dense foods for the most part. And a couple of nutrient dense foods that are really great for meeting that high calorie intake are avocados, right? Avocados, I know they're a little expensive sometimes, depending on the time of year and where you live, but avocados are high in saturated fat or unsaturated fat. They're high in unsaturated fat, so they've got a lot of energy. They pack a lot of energy, and they also have a lot of really good juicy nutrients that your body needs. So avocado is a good one to add for calories as well as nuts and seeds. Stalk your pantry with peanut butter or try to do as much natural as close to natural as you can get natural peanut butter. Other nut butters are awesome, like almond butter.

(13:33):
My personal favorite is sunflower seed butter. I think that's the best out of all of them. Use guacamole sandwich instead of mayo. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, I love that. That's a great idea. Let's see other things. Olive oil, right? Olive oil. I cook with olive oil all the time. Saiga geek is Italian. He can tell you Italian food, Greek food, Mediterranean food in general uses a lot of olive oil and a lot of olives in general. This is unsaturated fat that's high in calorie. You can pack in a lot of calories and not, and actually increase your good cholesterol levels, your HDL cholesterols cholesterol levels and reduce your LDL or bad cholesterol levels. So that's another way that you can add more calories without necessarily putting shitty food into your body. Let's see, what else? My go-tos, I mean avocado nuts and seeds or nut butters and olive oil.

(14:26):
Avocado oil as well. A lot of people like to cook with avocado oil. Be careful about coconut oil and coconut butter because although most saturated fats are fats that come from animals or animal products, coconut oil is actually saturated fat, so eating lots of coconut oil can raise your LDL cholesterol levels. That's your bad cholesterol levels and lower HDL, so you want to be careful with the coconut, okay? It's delicious and it has other benefits to your body, but especially if you are concerned with cholesterol and you're trying to keep your cholesterol low or lower, your cholesterol, you may want to stay away from coconut and coconut oil, but those are my recommendations. Also, if you have a high calorie intake requirement and you're trying to build muscle, or even if you're trying to burn fat, because some of these guys that I train, even when they're cutting, they still need to eat like 3000 calories.

(15:28):
So another way that you can get in those calories is smoothies, dude smoothies and smoothie bowls, liquid liquid nutrition, blend that shit up. And also soups, right? So like blended soups, chicken soup, that kind of thing. That's a great way that you can pack in a lot of nutrition for your sweet smoothies. Protein sources that you can use include Greek yogurt, non-fat, Greek yogurt. You can use protein powder if you want to use protein powder. You can also use silk tofu. Silk tofu is tofu that is specifically for people who are blending it into smoothies. It's got a much smoother consistency than the type of tofu that you might bake or fry to add to savory dishes, and then nuts and seeds or nut butter, another source of protein that you can add to your smoothies. And then just if you have high calorie needs, the nuts and the seeds are going to be great for that.

(16:40):
But also add in some fruits, right? Some high sugar fruits like bananas. Bananas are a starchy one too, so that's going to give you some more calories and some kind of berries or something like that for your savory dishes. If you're going to make some soup, like some blended high protein, high calorie soup, I recommend getting an immersion blender. That way you can sort of slow cook your ingredients like including chicken or Turkey or whatever, beans and vegetables, cook, all of that. You can slow cook it and then get an immersion blender and could, and it's going to go down so easy and be so tasty that you can have as a nice in-between meals, snack, or you can have it as part of your meals, but liquefying the food is another great way that you can get those calories in. If you have a high calorie intake, need a little honey and fruits go really good together, and that's a great way to increase the calorie density of your foods without necessarily having to go towards Pop-Tarts and other packaged junk food like that.

(17:52):
Even if you're bulking, you want to be very careful about taking in too many too much refined sugar. That refined sugar is going to increase inflammation, which when you're recovering from really hard workouts, is the last thing you want to do. You want to keep your inflammation levels at just where they need to be in order for your body to heal and build muscle, but not so much that you're in a ton of pain and that it's making it so you can't even work out. This is not to say never eat junk food, never eat treats, never eat refined sugar for the gains. Of course, food is fuel, but food is also part of our mental health and part of our social health too, like sharing dessert with friends or going out to pizza with your significant other food is part our social bonding. We have all these emotional ties to it as well.

(18:47):
So eating a healthy diet for the most part, where most of what you're eating is nutrient dense foods that allows for you to enjoy the foods that are high in sugar or are high in saturated fats, as long as it's not the majority of what you eat, those foods should be special because they are special. Those are the kinds of foods that you eat when you're with people that you love. Or for holidays, most of the time, you should be giving your body nutrient dense foods to help keep it operating optimally so that you can get the most out of your workouts and so that you can feel good too. Your body, your mental and emotional health will be better when you are eating nutrient dense foods for most of the time, there's usually a pretty quick turnover in terms of your energy levels and just gut health, but also mental clarity, mental health, emotional health.

(19:44):
What we eat does have an impact on these things. So when you switch to eating more clean foods, the nutrient dense foods, you can notice a pretty quick turnaround in terms of your mental health improving and your emotional health. It's not the whole thing. Still do the other things that you do for your mental emotional health. Still go to therapy, still do shadow work, still meditate, still journal all those things, but also eat in a way that's going to support your mental health as well. Granola is another great resource if you have high calorie needs, if you're focusing on muscle building, because granola is one of those things that when you're cutting, it's like, oh, man, I want more. You can't have very much because the nuts and the seeds that go into making really yummy granola and is high calorie. But if you have high calorie needs, adding granola to yogurt or eating it like cereal with milk or keefer or something like that is a great way to add some calories in a healthy way.

(20:47):
Just watch out for the added sugars. And also the sodium. If you're not making it yourself, if you're buying it pre-made, anytime you buy something that's packaged, it's going to have a lot more sodium than it would have if you made it at home. So just keep that in mind. Pasta is another one that I recommend for people who have high energy needs and also potatoes, any kind of starchy food. Those complex carbohydrate foods include pasta, potatoes, also yucca. I don't know if you guys have ever eaten yucca rice. Of course, rice, and especially if it's brown rice. Yes, these are great ways to add in calories to your food while also adding in nutrients. If you are cutting though, if you need to cut calories and you can't have regular pasta, chickpea pasta is a really good alternative that's also going to have a little bit of protein in it.

(21:39):
And I've tried a bunch of different types of vegetable based pastas, and I feel like chickpea pasta is probably the closest in taste and consistency to regular macaroni based pasta, so that will add more protein, and that's what a lot of people, I have a client who's diabetic, and so he can't have regular pasta because it spikes his insulin, but he uses chickpea pasta instead, and it's fine and it a perfect replacement for him. And beans in general, beans are also pretty calorie dense beans are a food that you can live off of. They're complete food. They have all three macronutrients that your body needs, protein, carbs, and fat, and some beans are going to be higher in fat than others. And so yeah, adding AMI to dishes is another way to add a little bit more protein and more calories. So we went over how to eat in a bulk.

(22:39):
I wanted to talk a little bit more about calorie cutting. So I'm going to be posting a blog post this week, and it's bulking versus cutting. Kind of a rundown on the differences between these two phases of diet, and I feel like I talk a lot about cutting calories and a lot about fat loss tips, and I don't often talk enough about how to help people who are hard gainers people who need to eat a lot of calories in order to reach their calorie goal, regardless of whether they're cutting or bulking. So I'm happy that we did focus on that, and it's also something to look forward to, right? If you are or have been in a calorie deficit for a while, if you've been in a fat loss focus for a while, it's something you want to be mindful of and start learning how to go about bulking or reverse dieting when you're adding more calories, ways to add more calories in a healthy way.

(23:36):
So this gives you something to look forward to because you should not be dieting forever. You should not be in a perpetual fat loss phase if you are constantly in a fat loss phase. There's something wrong. There's something wrong with your approach. There's something wrong with your diet. There's something wrong with your exercise because fat loss is not the fat loss state. That state where your body is burning fat, that is a stressful state for your body to be in, right? It's high stress on your whole system. Literally, your body sees it as an emergency. We got to break down tissue because we're not getting enough calories. So that is just going to have more stress on your overall system when you are in a fat loss phase, a lot of the times, not always, but that it is the case. Being in a cut, being in a calorie deficit phase is going to add a certain level of systemic stress onto you, which is one more thing when we're talking about the mental health thing.

(24:40):
Something you may want to consider if you're going through something difficult, if you're going through grief, if you're experiencing grief or something high stress, remember that being in a fat loss phase or trying to stay in a fat loss phase is going to give you a certain level of systemic stress. And if your overall systemic stress is already super high beyond what you feel like you can reasonably bear, it may be worthwhile considering whether you want to step back, go exit the fat loss phase and just focus on maintenance, right? Maintaining your calories or maybe focus on building muscle. Try to give your body, get your body into a muscle building phase. You can burn that fat off later when your system can handle it, right? So fat loss is my ideal is that for most of the time, most of my clients, I want most of you guys to be trying to build muscle. That's where that's a healthy place to be because it's much easier on your mind and your body. That's where your body is focused on building tissue rather than breaking tissue down.

(25:47):
You're going to feel better overall when you're in a calorie surplus and focusing on eating more rather than in that restrictive stage. So if you are in a fat loss phase, or you've had to be in a fat loss phase for a while, this is why I often recommend diet breaks and we take a break and reverse diet and maybe go into a bulk or a surplus. It's important to alternate these because it just gives you a whole system a break when it needs it. So ideally, most of the time, you should be at least in maintenance, if not in a muscle building phase, if you're focused on fitness. Fat loss is not a lifestyle. It is a sometimes thing that you do, you're trying to cut when you're trying to reduce your body fat percentage, but because of the level of stress that it puts on your system, it's not a state that you should be in perpetually. We want to build a lifestyle that supports your body being healthy. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner Podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. Make sure to give me a follow on social media. I'm Jaydigains everywhere. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink some water, and take care of yourself, and I'll see you soon.

ABOUT JAYD HARRISON

Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains) is a personal trainer and content creator. She helps people to build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with her online coaching programs and social media content. Check out some of Jayd’s coaching videos on Youtube, or join Jayd live on Twitch and follow on social media: