What to Eat After You Workout to Lose Fat/ Build Muscle

Last week I discussed how to fuel your workout routines if your goal is to lose fat or build muscle. If you missed that, you can read that post/ watch that video here.

Today I want to teach you how to fuel your body post workout routine so that you can continue losing fat or building muscle.

After you do your workout routines, you have a 30 minute window right after you workout where your glycogen receptors are wide open and ready for nutrients. This is not the most important thing in the world, but it can be helpful, especially for an already fairly fit person trying to become VERY fit.

After you workout routine, protein is very important to help repair muscle tissue breakdown and to stop the release of insulin from the liver. The fastest digesting protein is best here, and that is whey protein powder in an isolate form or egg whites, if you want a whole food source. If you cannot tolerate whey protein powder I would suggest egg white protein powder.

In addition to a fast digesting protein, we can also manipulate our insulin to increase storage and drive nutrients into our cells, by adding carbohydrates to this “meal.” But now it’s important to talk about which carb source is best for this.

Well, we have the two monosaccharides, fructose and dextrose. Fructose is fruit sugar and it is okay, but it’s not the number one choice because it is stored in the liver. Dextrose aka glucose is great as it’s absorbed directly into the gut which is fast, but according to research, some people find it causes fat storage. It can also cause a huge energy spike and drop, which isn’t the best for most people either.

We have the disaccharides, which means it contains two molecules – one of glucose and one of fructose, which right there you can go ahead and assume these won’t be your best bet because fructose is stored in the liver. But those are sucrose, normal table sugar, and lactose, which many people have digestive issues with.

Lastly, we have the polysaccharide, maltodextrin, which is made of loosely bonded glucose. This is absorbed directly into the gut, but not as fast as your basic dextrose because of the loose bonds. Maltodextrin aka complex carbs will raise your blood sugar and insulin to help get the protein into our cells faster, but not so fast that it will cause a peak and valley in our energy levels. The source of these sugars are corn, potato and rice.

In addition, we need to take the glycemic index of our food into consideration. Anything under 55 on the glycemic index is considered low and anything over 70 is considered high. For post workout muscle gains, we want to only look at foods that are high, and we want to look at corn, potato or rice based carbs to go with our whey protein or egg whites. Some examples that are actually appetizing post workout may be rice cakes, rice, sweet potato, corn flakes, puffed rice or rice milk.

Lastly, we need to discuss how much protein and how many carbs. Well, loosely speaking, we need about one gram of protein for every pound we weigh to build muscle. So let’s say you weigh 140 pounds, then you would need about 140g of protein each day, and if you eat five times a day (including this PWO shake) then you would need 28g of protein at each feeding time.

Well, if your goal is to lose fat and you are above 30% body fat, then just have your protein alone. If you are trying to build muscle/ get lean/ are below 30% body fat, then you want twice the amount of protein, in carbs. So that would be 28g of protein and 56g of carbs.

I hope this helps you in your struggle. If you need help with individualized training and a clean eating meal plan, I can help!