work out diet

during  your workout sessions.

This is the time of day when you are going to be performing the most energy intensive activities and the time of day when you want to be focusing your intake around the foods that provide the energy you will need.

Another consideration when structuring your daily plate schedule is your goal. You’ll eat slightly differently depending on whether you are working to build muscle mass, weight maintenance or fat burning.

If your goal is to burn fat, your total energy intake needs to be lower than what you burn off each day therefore your plates will have to reflect lower calorie choices and lower energy overall taken in. The difference in energy taken in should come primarily from carbohydrates and fat rich foods.

However, you do not want to reduce protein intake regardless of what your goal happens to be. Protein is the one constant that must remain in your diet regardless of your goal. In fact, your protein needs usually go up slightly when dieting so you’ll want to eat a little more of them and slightly reduce the fat and carbohydrate rich foods in your diet.

However, if your goal is to build and tone muscle tissue, you need to eat a few additional calories over and beyond what you normally would because you need that extra energy to complete the muscle building process. Your body will have a hard time gaining any muscle strength or size without these additional calories added. As the volume of your muscle building workouts increase you will require additional fuel.

When building muscle and adding calories, your best bet is to add those calories right around the workout period or as close to it as possible because this is the time the body is most likely to use them up for muscle mass building rather than converting them to body fat storage.