?Nutrition 101: Back to Basics If you go into any gym in the world and randomly ask 100 people to pinpoint the most important thing for achieving success in bodybuilding and fitness, you’d probably get just as many different answers. Most replies, however, would involve various training programs or styles. As important as training is, nutrition plays an equally large role — your diet is almost always responsible for either success or failure in bodybuilding and virtually any fitness program. Here I’ll present a basic nutrition program that includes some key tips on nutritional timing, metabolic enhancement and preferred food and supplement choices. This program can teach you how to determine your daily protein, carbohydrate, fat and caloric needs. So get your calculators and notebooks ready; back-to-basics Nutrition 101 is about to begin. DAILY CALORIC INTAKEBefore we examine the various macronutrients, let’s look at the common denominator that links all types of foods: calories. This is a topic that has been used and abused a lot over the past several years. At one point, high-calorie diets were in, then low-calorie diets came back in fashion. The same holds true for protein, carbohydrate and fat. Opinions seem to change all the time. The following formula, on the other hand, is tried and true. If you follow it and make adjustments as needed, you can’t help but achieve nutritional nirvana. Unlike many of the complex formulas for figuring daily caloric needs that have been introduced, my formula is a simple, effective method. If your goal is to add muscle while not adding bodyfat, or even slowly eliminating bodyfat, multiply your weight (in pounds) by 13, 14 or 15 — 13 if you have a slow metabolism, 14 for a moderate metabolism and 15 for a fast metabolism. For hardgainers or those who simply want to gain weight, multiply your weight by 16, 17 or 18 according to the same metabolic progression. If yo...
