Many people when trying to gain muscle or lose fat think that working out is how you achieve this ideal. Little do they know, how you eat is vital to both muscle gain and fat loss. Some bodybuilders say that bodybuilding is 75% nutrition.

So, what do you eat when you are trying to either gain muscle or lose fat? It might sound simple, but you eat protein, carbohydrates and fats.

In muscle gain, protein is the main contributor. Eating dietary protein increases protein synthesis in the body and this will result in muscle gain. Your muscles feed off of protein and without it, you will not gain muscle, but will lose it.

At the same time, you need your bodies fuel, carbohydrates. People are starting to realize that eating to many carbohydrates will negatively effect muscle gain , but you cannot cut carbs out of your diet completely. If you don’t eat enough carbohydrates, you can potentially loose muscle because your body will dip into your protein reserves in your muscles for energy. This is not what you want to happen.

Finally, you need fat to help produce testosterone and other anabolic hormones, and we all know the value of having testosterone in our body (If not see The Natural Steroid).

In fat loss, you need these same three components. You still need protein to maintain muscle. The important part is that you need just the right amount of carbohydrates. Eating carbs signals your body to burn carbs. Now the secret is that eating fat also triggers your body to use fat for energy. The very tricky part of this is that you need to eat carbohydrates to fuel your body for what you want to do that day, but just the right amount so you can allow the fat you just ate to burn fat not carbs. You cannot just say that fat is the secret to weight loss, but you can say that the right type of fat is the secret. Fat that is unrefined meaning unsaturated like avocado and nuts are the right type of fat. People think that if you eat fat you will get fat, but its the opposite!