From The Archives :
2/23/20
At the gym I hear “hey, can I ask for some advice” he says from the lat pulldown, “yeah, zup” and I pause momentarily at seated row, “I’m trying to get bigger, do you have any advice”.
I’ll write what my advice to him was :
The easiest way to get extra calories in is to drink them.
You obviously play around with the variables, but you make a shake with some combination of heavy cream, milk, raw eggs, and ice cream.
The raw egg shake.
No one got huge eating perfectly clean, junk food will get calories up, but a smorgasbord of garbage calories isn’t the way to go.
You want big calories filled with nutritious foods. Not super clean, not the stereotypical foods, but with more normal still nutritious foods.
Saturated fats from dairy and meat are your friend, nothing is more anabolic, and it’s high intake will improve how you feel, your quality of life. How I feel taking in high levels of saturated animal fats is why I continue to do so.
Complete overhaul isn’t as easily done as small changes are for most.
If you want to get bigger and are eating chicken breast at dinner (he is), eat ground beef or a steak instead. You’re keeping the protein level close enough to constant, but the switch just bumped up the calories due to saturated animal fat with no real effort on your part.
Meat and dairy are truly the foods of the big and strong.
Beef is better than chicken.
I didn’t even get into telling him of olive oil shots, or how simple a crockpot makes cooking to be.
Plus high reps on leg work.
PostScript :
~6 months later the same guy came up to me and thanked me, told me that he’d done exactly as I’d said during the lock down, had switched from primarily eating chicken stir fry to beef stir fry, and had implemented some dairy consumption, drinking eggs, cream, and ice cream surprised at how well he stomached it, and now was the largest/most muscular he’d ever been at 195 compared to the 180lbs that he implemented my advice at.