Over the past four years I’ve been trying to gain muscle mass, to no avail. Benjamin keeps telling me that I need to eat more. Little did I know how much more.
I spent some time googling this weekend and realized that according to a best-guess estimate, I should be consuming rougly 2200 calories a day to maintain my current weight based on my usual physical activity (which doesn’t include marathon training, just going to the gym and lifting 5 days a week). Furthermore it appears that to gain muscle mass I should be consuming between 3000 and 3300 calories a day.
Those numbers didn’t mean too much too me – while I always read nutrition labels, I’ve never been a calorie counter. A quick calculation of what I ate yesterday shows that I consumed under 2000 calories. That will never do.
So today I’ve been trying to eat more than usual and keep track of it all. Thus far: my usual post-workout protein shake, low-fat yogurt, Clif bar, whole-wheat spaghetti & meat sauce (that would have been lunch), a coke (I went for the regular instead of the Coke Zero that I usually have), a meal-replacement shake, a package of All-Bran Bites, and another coke (two cokes in one day is an oddity). Total calories thus far at 4pm: 1441. At this rate, I won’t make it past 2000 calories today either and I’m already stuffed!.
Granted, maybe since, apparently, I’ve been getting along with a bit less than 2000 calories a day up until now that I probably don’t need to get all the way to 3300 to gain some mass, but even the upper 2000s look like they might be a challenge.
On a related note: today’s workout rating: 6 out of 10 — not one of my better days.
