What can you eat more and what should you eat less during exercise?

The core logic is never an absolute "fasting/freedom to eat", but to adjust based on your training goals - you can eat more high-protein, low-processed complex carbohydrates during the muscle-building period. No matter what stage, you should try to avoid high-sugar and high-oil refined processed foods as much as possible. The flexibility is left to your own training intensity and appetite.

When I was building muscle in the first two years, I ate five meals a day. In addition to the regular meals of brown rice, braised beef, and stir-fried broccoli, snacks were either steamed sweet potatoes with sugar-free yogurt, or ready-to-eat chicken breasts with a handful of almonds. After training, I would also eat half a corn and a spoonful of whey protein. In those two months, my bench press increased by 6 kilograms, and my body fat only increased by less than 1%. It was much more efficient in building muscle than eating hamburgers before.

When it comes to this, someone will definitely bring up the old controversy of "can you eat egg yolks for fitness?" A few years ago, I also believed that "egg yolks have high cholesterol" and only ate egg whites when eating eggs. Later, after checking new sports nutrition research, I found out that as long as you don't have abnormal blood lipid metabolism, you can eat eggs. It’s absolutely fine to eat 3-4 whole eggs a day. The choline in egg yolks can also help you relieve nervous fatigue. Several of my friends who compete in natural competitions eat 4 whole eggs a day during the preparation period. There is no problem with blood lipid indicators at all. There is really no need to treat egg yolks as a scourge.

In fact, if you are too lazy to remember so many complicated nutritional terms, you are right to choose foods that can be seen in their true colors. Freshly killed fish, freshly picked green leafy vegetables, and whole grains. These foods have a low glycemic index and a strong sense of satiety. Even if you eat a few more mouthfuls after training, you will not accumulate fat. Sometimes I train my buttocks and legs until I feel dizzy, and I eat an extra bowl of brown rice when I go home. The next day, I don't feel any weight gain, but my recovery is better than usual.

As for the foods that you should touch as little as possible, they are not just those monsters that will become useless if you touch them, but those highly processed foods that you can’t tell what the ingredients are, such as taking a bite of crispy bread with crumbs, bubble milk tea with half a cup of non-dairy cream, Korean fried chicken with thick batter, these foods either contain excessive amounts of trans fat, or have an alarming amount of added sugar. People, it doesn’t matter if you are craving for food after training occasionally. Last week, I trained my legs until my legs were soft. I bought a cone to eat on the way out, which did not delay the progress of fat brushing this week. But if you eat these as meals every day, even if you go to the gym for 3 hours a day, you will not be able to lose body fat. It will also aggravate the body’s inflammatory response, and you will not be able to recover from the soreness after training for three or four days.

Another point that many people have been arguing about for a long time is whether you can eat fruits when working out. Some people say that high fructose will make you fat, while others say that you can eat as much vitamins as you like. In fact, it also depends on the amount. If you eat one or two apples, half a catty of strawberries and blueberries a day, it is absolutely fine, and you can also supplement vitamins. Help you recover. If you show off half a durian and three pounds of mangoes at a time, you will gain weight no matter whether you are fit or not. Especially friends who are in the period of losing fat. Don’t believe in the "fruit meal replacement". Fructose will make you hungry faster, and it will make you get up in the middle of the night to look for snacks.

You really don’t have to be too strict about your fitness diet. I used to help my friends who were just starting to exercise as dietary reference. I never gave them a list of “what they must not eat.”