A lean muscle diet is a way of eating that promotes lean muscle growth, great tone throughout your body, and weight loss and weight management. A lean muscle diet consists of eating lean protein foods with slow-releasing carbohydrates. When you combine this way of eating with consistent lean fitness training, the results are highly effective in burning belly fat, shedding weight, toning up, and reaching a lean body physique.
What Do I Eat On a Lean Muscle Diet?
If you’re eating for a lean muscle diet, you need to combine lean protein foods with healthy carbohydrates to achieve a well-balanced plate that will propel you through your lean body workouts.
You have to remember that a lean muscle diet only works when supplemented with an effective lean fitness plan, like what we offer on Mission Lean. If you have your own exercises that have worked for you, you can stick to those and supplement your training with a lean muscle diet as well. But you have to make sure your workout is structured to achieve lean body gains, as we discuss in detail later in this article.
The goal of any lean fitness workout is to get you up to at least 80% of your maximal heart rate. When you are in this heart rate zone, a significant portion of the calories you burn come from carbohydrates. That is why supplementing your lean protein foods with healthy carbs – brown rice, pasta, potatoes, and buckwheat, is instrumental in enabling you to push through lean fitness workouts.
A Healthy Meal Plan Must Be Based On a Well-Balanced Plate
The recipes and way of eating we prescribe on Mission Lean includes a well-balanced plate, and you can check out the type of lean protein foods we recommend to eat alongside healthy carbohydrates. Prepare our lean beef bowl or our lean turkey meatballs. Try out our breakfast toast or our rice veggie bowl.
A lean muscle diet must contain all of the necessary nutrients, from fruits and vegetables, to lean protein foods, to healthy carbs, to healthy fats. Avocado is a great lean muscle food that should be included in as many meals as possible during your week. Avocado is both filling, highly nutritious, and provides heart-healthy fat. You can swap out dressing, butter, and mayo with avocado; this is a great nutritional tip that will promote some serious lean body gains if you implement it consistently.
How Important are Lean Protein Foods on a Lean Muscle Diet?
Lean protein foods are incredibly important as part of a lean muscle diet, but should never be eaten alone without a balanced plate of veggies, healthy carbs, and healthy fat.
When you train for lean fitness, as opposed to a weight lifting or bodybuilding workout, you are pushing yourself aerobically. This means that you will raise your heart rate and tap into glycogen stores in your muscles. Therefore, carbs must be eaten in addition to lean protein foods when you train in this way. Without sufficient glycogen in your muscles, which comes from carbohydrates, you will be unable to push yourself to the fullest extent in your workout.
Lean protein foods that you should include in your diet are lean chicken, lean ground beef, wild salmon and other wild-caught fish, nuts, beans, seeds, and high protein vegetables like broccoli and spinach. Complement healthy carbs like brown rice, pasta, potatoes, and buckwheat with your lean protein foods and try to structure a balanced plate of about half carbs and half lean protein combined with healthy fat (such as avocado).
When you find the optimal balance of structuring your plate, and you combine that with a great lean fitness program you will begin to see incredible results in your body. Don’t forget, a lean muscle diet only works in conjunction with an effective fitness plan.
Supplement a Lean Muscle Diet with Lean Fitness Workouts
There’s no replacement for a top-level lean body workout to supplement a lean muscle diet. At the end of the day, no amount of lean protein that you consume can facilitate lean muscle gains without a consistent routine of lean body training.
Training for lean muscles means finding the perfect balance between strength-based exercises and cardio output so you build great tone while also shedding fat. Mission Lean provides you with the lean body routines and workout plan structure you need for building lean muscle, getting shredded, and reaching your peak performance.
With that said, if you’ve had success with your own lean muscle exercises and training plan, you can continue to follow that in conjunction with a diet focused on lean muscle gains. It’s all about how you structure your workout to supplement your lean eating plan.
The Best Exercises and Proper Nutrition Will Get You the Body You Want
Mission Lean workouts revolve around HIIT training (High Intensity Interval Training), where we provide you with top-level strength moves, but situated in the framework of sets of six or eight exercises that you complete together and without rest. When you train in this way and eat to match it, the effect is powerful.
We recommend you train first thing in the morning on a lean healthy breakfast. The lean protein foods that we advise eating should primarily be consumed for lunch, right after a Mission Lean workout, or at dinner, when you fuel yourself for the next day’s workout.
You should also incorporate cardio workouts into your lean muscle routine at least 2-3 times per week. Steady state cardio won’t do it – rather, you should put out good efforts of at least 20 minutes where you really push yourself. Ideally, you should arrive at an 80% maximal heart rate, and enact the EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) response in your body.
When you arrive at an 80% max heart rate, you begin to create an oxygen deficit in your body, and this is where the EPOC effect comes into play as your body needs to intake extra oxygen after your workout. The body needs 5 calories to intake 1 liter of oxygen, and so you continue to burn calories after the workout has ended.
Start Burning Fat, Losing Weight, and Building Lean Muscle
The Best Exercises and Proper Nutrition will get you the body you want
Start tomorrow by going for a great run or biking session, and then prepare yourself a lean chicken roast. Combining a great lean body training session with the complementary lean muscle foods will get you on your way. It’s about finding the optimal balance between input and output, so you begin to get into a consistent routine of lean body training on a lean muscle diet.
Jon Pearlman is a former standout tennis player at Harvard, ATP-ranked touring pro, and author of The Lean Body Manual. He founded Mission Lean to share his unique formula for lean body fitness and nutrition, an approach that took over a decade to develop and perfect. He is an ACE Certified Personal Trainer and Fitness Nutrition Specialist.
