Eating for training

Nutrition advice online is mostly noise, and almost all of it is arguing about the last 5%. If you are training seriously, four things account for nearly all of the result: eating roughly enough total food for what you are asking your body to do, getting enough protein, sleeping, and doing it consistently for months rather than days.

Everything after that — meal timing, which carbohydrate, whether you eat late, the order you put food in your mouth — is real but small. It is worth attending to once the four above are genuinely handled, and it is worth ignoring until then. Most people who feel stuck are not missing a trick; they are inconsistent about the basics and looking for a trick instead.

The guides that follow explain what the main nutrients do and roughly what the evidence says about how much of them people training tend to need. They are general ranges, not a plan for you. Bodyweight, training load, age, sleep, medication and medical history all move the numbers, which is why nobody honest gives you one figure and why we are not going to either.

One thing worth saying plainly, because the rest of this guide gives floors for individual nutrients and it would be easy to read those as a diet. Under-eating is the more common problem among people who train hard, not over-eating, and it does not announce itself as hunger. It shows up as lifts that stall for no reason, sleep that stops working, getting ill more often, feeling cold, losing interest in training, and — for women — periods becoming irregular or stopping, which is a reason to see a GP rather than to eat more carefully. If several of those are true at once, eating more is far more likely to be the answer than eating more precisely. Nothing in this guide is a reason to eat less.

And if counting any of this starts to feel compulsive, or food is becoming something to control rather than something to eat, stop using the numbers — they are not worth it, and they are not the point of any of this. In the UK, Beat runs free helplines and online support at beateatingdisorders.org.uk, and a GP is a reasonable first conversation. That is a better use of ten minutes than any macronutrient target on this page.

This article exists to answer the question people actually ask: which foods are for losing weight, which are for building muscle, and which are for staying where you are. The honest answer is that it is very largely the same food, and that what separates the three goals is not in the trolley. That is not a dodge. It is the most useful thing in this guide, because it means you do not have to start again every time your goal changes.

Food does not know what you are training for. A chicken thigh, a tin of chickpeas, a bag of frozen peas, a bag of rice, a pot of yoghurt, a tin of mackerel — each one is the same food with the same things in it whichever of the three you are doing. There is no food that belongs to only one of them, and none that has to be removed for any of them. The composition table in this app is deliberately one table for that reason: it says what is in food, and it says the same thing on every day of your life.

What does change is the amount, and the things around the food. How much you are eating in total, how hard and how often you are training, how you are sleeping, and whether you have done any of it for long enough to tell. Those four move between the goals. The shopping does not.

Take building muscle first, because it is where the evidence is strongest and the food job is clearest. The stimulus is the training, not the eating — the muscle-building article covers what that means in the gym. Food's job is to permit what the training asked for, which comes down to getting protein in across the day and eating enough in total to be building anything at all. The protein article gives the range and a worked example and this one is not going to repeat it.

The part nobody tells you about gaining is that for most people who say they cannot, the problem is neither the choice of food nor the timing. It is that they are eating a good deal less than they believe, usually because three meals a day is all their routine has room for. The fix is structural — a fourth eating occasion, food that travels, something you can face when you are not especially hungry — which makes it a shopping and prep problem rather than a knowledge one.

Maintaining is the phase nobody writes about, because there is nothing to sell you. What changes is mostly how much attention it deserves, which is very little. Protein does not drop just because you have stopped chasing a number, and the training does not stop either — it becomes about holding the numbers in your log rather than adding to them, which is a real job and a harder one than it sounds.

The thing worth knowing about maintaining is that it never looks like a flat line. Bodyweight moves by a kilo or two across a week on water, salt, how much is in your gut, how much glycogen your last session left behind, what time of day you stood on the scales, and for women where you are in your cycle. That is not something going wrong. Reading it as something going wrong is how people end up changing things to fix a problem that was never there.

Which leaves losing weight, and here we will tell you plainly what we are not going to publish. There is no list of best foods for weight loss on this site and there is not going to be one. Three reasons, and none of them is squeamishness. The first is what this whole article is about: it would not be true, because the foods are the same foods. The second is that in the UK anybody advertising a product or a method as producing weight loss is required to back that claim with rigorous trials on people, and testimonials do not count as evidence — nobody handing you a list of foods on the internet has done that, ourselves included. The third matters most.

A published list of foods, ranked, with a good end and a bad end, stops being information about food the moment somebody with a difficult relationship with eating reads it. It becomes a set of rules. That is why the composition table here is sorted alphabetically inside each group rather than by protein, why nothing in it is colour-coded, and why you will not find the words best or worst attached to a food anywhere in this guide. It costs us a more clickable page and it was not a close decision.

What we can honestly give you is what is in food, how to read a label, and how to cook a week's worth without it falling apart — which is what the rest of this guide is. Anything genuinely individual, and anything with a medical dimension, belongs with a GP or a registered dietitian who can ask you questions a website cannot.

And the line that sits in Start Here belongs here too, because this is the article people arrive at from a search engine. Under-eating is the more common problem among people who train hard, it does not announce itself as hunger, and nothing in this guide is a reason to eat less. If food is becoming something to control rather than something to eat, Beat runs free helplines and online support at beateatingdisorders.org.uk, and a GP is a reasonable first conversation.

So: one trolley, three goals. What moves between them is how much of it you eat, what you are asking your body to do in the gym, and how long you keep doing it. If that sounds anticlimactic, it is also why the person who has trained for ten years shops in the same aisles as the person who started on Monday.

Most of the benefit is there by about 1.6g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight a day. The commonly quoted 1.6–2.2g range is not a target to hit the top of — the upper end is headroom for individual variation, for eating in a deficit, and for people who simply prefer eating that way. Above roughly 2.2g most of the research has struggled to show anything further, though it is not a settled question and the studies are smaller than you would like.

The next paragraph has example protein numbers.

In practice: if you weigh 84kg — about 13 stone 3 — that is roughly 134g a day at 1.6g/kg, and about 185g at the top of the range. A chicken breast is around 35g of protein, a large egg about 7g, a 200g pot of strained or 0% Greek yoghurt about 20g — a standard Greek-STYLE pot is nearer half that — and a scoop of whey around 25g. Two kilograms of bodyweight either way will not move those numbers meaningfully.

Getting enough across the day matters more than the exact timing, but spreading intake across 3–5 meals with 25–40g of protein each tends to be easier to hit consistently than trying to cram it into one or two sittings.

Whole food sources — meat, fish, eggs, dairy, legumes — come with other nutrients a shake doesn't. Treat protein powder as the thing that fills the gap on a busy day, not the foundation of your intake.

Almost every packaged food sold in the UK carries the same nutrition panel — there are exemptions, mostly for small producers and unprocessed single-ingredient foods — and once you know what the numbers are made of you can work the rest out yourself rather than trusting anybody's app.

Energy is not measured, it is calculated — from the grams of each nutrient, using conversion factors set in law. They are in Annex XIV of the assimilated Food Information to Consumers Regulation (1169/2011), and they are the same on every label in the country: protein 4 kcal per gram, carbohydrate 4, fat 9, fibre 2, polyols 2.4, alcohol 7. That is the whole arithmetic. Fat carries more than twice what protein and carbohydrate do per gram, which is why it moves a total fastest and why the same weight of two foods can differ enormously.

Polyols are worth knowing about if you eat protein bars or anything sold as low sugar: they are sweeteners that carry 2.4 kcal per gram rather than sugar's 4, which is how a bar can be lower in sugar without being much lower in energy.

The percentages beside them are Reference Intakes — a labelling convention, set in Annex XIII of the same Regulation, based on an average adult eating 2,000 kcal (8,400 kJ) a day. It is a yardstick for comparing products in a shop, not a target for you. Someone lifting four times a week and walking to work needs more than that; someone smaller and sedentary needs less. Treat the % column as "how much of a typical day's food is in this packet", which is the question it can actually answer.

The next paragraph has example calorie numbers.

Putting it together with the rest of this guide, at 84kg. Near the BOTTOM of each range — protein 1.6g/kg, carbohydrate 5g/kg, fat 0.8g/kg, which is the middle of the fat range rather than its floor — that is 134g, 420g and 67g, which at 4, 4 and 9 kcal per gram comes to roughly 2,800 kcal. Run the same sums at the TOP of the same ranges and you get about 3,850. Take fat down to its actual floor of 0.6g/kg and the lower figure is nearer 2,670.

That span is the point, and it is why this article does not give you a number. The guide describes someone eating somewhere between 2,800 and 3,850 kcal a day — and the lower figure is the floor, not the target. If you are training four or five times a week and eating well under 2,800, the thing to examine is whether you are eating enough, not whether you are eating precisely.

Two things that arithmetic does not tell you. It is an estimate built on estimates, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a budget to hit. And a total says nothing about whether a diet is any good: 2,800 kcal of biscuits and 2,800 kcal of food you cooked are the same number and a completely different week.

Carbohydrate is the fuel your body reaches for first during hard, repeated efforts — which is exactly what a set of squats is. It is stored in muscle and liver as glycogen, and a heavy session draws that store down. Refill it and the next session feels normal; do not, and the weight feels heavier than it was last week for no obvious reason.

This is the nutrient people cut first, usually because it is the one blamed loudest. In practice, lifters who cut carbohydrate hard tend to notice it in the last two sets rather than on the scales: work capacity drops, sessions get shorter, and the training that was supposed to be driving progress quietly gets worse.

Published ranges vary a lot with how much you actually train, and the commonly quoted 3–5g per kilogram of bodyweight a day is the band for LIGHT activity rather than for lifting several times a week — a tier too low for most people reading this. Moderate training tends to be quoted nearer 5–7g/kg, and high-volume or endurance work higher again. Treat those as orders of magnitude rather than targets: the honest answer is that it moves with your week.

Starchy staples — rice, oats, potatoes, bread, pasta — plus fruit will get most people there without any special products. The timing matters far less than the total.

Dietary fat carries the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, and it supplies the essential fatty acids the body cannot make for itself. That is what it is for, which is why diets are normally built with a fat range in them rather than around removing it.

A common general floor is around 0.6–1g per kilogram of bodyweight a day — for an 84kg lifter, roughly 50–84g. Below that, people tend to report feeling flat and hungry, and very low-fat diets are hard to stick to, which is usually what actually ends them.

Sources matter less than people think, but variety is sensible: olive oil, nuts, seeds, oily fish, eggs, dairy. Fat is the most energy-dense nutrient, so it is also the easiest one to accidentally eat a lot of — which is a reason to be aware of it, not a reason to fear it.

The old advice was that you had roughly thirty minutes after training to get protein in or the session was wasted. That is not what the evidence supports. The window is measured in hours, and what actually matters is whether you hit your intake across the day.

Before a session, most people do better having eaten something two to three hours beforehand, weighted towards carbohydrate and protein and lighter on fat and fibre, which slow digestion and can sit heavily under a bar. Training fasted suits some people and not others; what tends to be true is that the later sets are worse, and the later sets are where the work is.

Afterwards, eat a normal meal with protein in it when it suits you. If you genuinely cannot — a session that ends late, a commute, no appetite — that is the gap a shake fills. That is the honest use for one: convenience when food is not practical, rather than something that does a job food cannot.

The familiar two-litres-a-day figure is repeated as a rule but was never meant as one — it traces back to an old intake estimate that included the water already present in food, which is roughly a fifth of most people's total. Actual needs vary enormously with bodyweight, temperature, how much you sweat and what you are doing.

For practical purposes: drink to thirst, have something to hand during a session, and use the colour of your urine as a rough gauge — pale straw is about right, and darker than that usually just means you are behind. One thing that breaks the gauge: B vitamins, riboflavin especially, turn urine a vivid yellow that has nothing to do with hydration, so if you take a multivitamin or a pre-workout the colour will tell you very little for a few hours. Being mildly under-hydrated makes hard training feel harder; it is one of the cheapest things to get right.

One exception worth knowing, because it is the one case where drinking more is the wrong response. If urine is dark brown or cola-coloured rather than simply concentrated, and especially if it follows an unusually hard or unfamiliar session and comes with severe muscle pain, swelling or weakness, that is a reason to seek medical attention the same day rather than to drink more water. It is uncommon, but lifters are one of the groups it happens to, and it is not something to wait out.

Electrolyte drinks are useful in genuinely high-sweat situations — long sessions, hot rooms, heavy sweaters. For a 45-minute session in a British gym, water is almost always sufficient, and whatever you will actually remember to bring beats the ideal drink left at home.

Most of the supplement industry sells things with little or no evidence behind them at prices that have nothing to do with what is inside. It is worth knowing which short list has actually held up under repeated testing, mostly so you can ignore everything else.

Creatine monohydrate is the most studied sports supplement there is, and the cheap unbranded version is the same molecule as the expensive one. Caffeine is among the most heavily researched substances in sport, and you already know whether it agrees with you. Protein powder is food in a convenient format — it does nothing a chicken breast does not, and it only helps at all if you would otherwise miss your intake. Vitamin D is worth a conversation with a GP in the UK specifically, because sunlight is scarce here for much of the year.

Almost everything else — testosterone boosters, fat burners, BCAAs alongside adequate protein, most pre-workout blends beyond their caffeine — ranges from unproven to pointless. Supplements are also lightly regulated compared with medicines: what is on the label is not guaranteed to be what is in the tub, and if you compete under anti-doping rules, look for batch testing before you buy.

If any of this interacts with a medication or a condition, that is a question for a GP or a pharmacist rather than for an app.

The meal prep article gives you four roles to fill — a protein anchor, a base, vegetables, and a fat source — and says the roles are the method while the specific foods are yours. This is the shopping half of that. It is not a list to buy and it is not a week's menu. It is what is actually in the aisles, so that filling those roles takes five minutes of thought instead of forty minutes of wandering.

Protein anchors, and they are in one paragraph on purpose rather than the plant ones arriving as a footnote. Chilled: chicken thighs and breast, turkey mince, pork loin, lean beef mince, salmon and white fish, eggs, cottage cheese, plain and strained yoghurt, halloumi, firm tofu, tempeh, seitan, Quorn mince and pieces. Tinned and jarred: tuna, mackerel, sardines, salmon, chickpeas, butter beans, kidney beans, black beans, green lentils. Dried: red split lentils, green and brown lentils, chickpeas, butter beans, soya mince. Frozen: fish fillets, prawns, chicken, edamame, soya beans, peas. Cupboard: peanut butter, oats, nuts and seeds. Some of these have a per-100g figure in the composition table in this app, with its source code beside it; the table is a short reference rather than a full database, and the pack in your hand beats both.

Two practical things about the plant column, neither of which is a knock on it. Most of it, pulses and grains especially, brings carbohydrate and fibre along with the protein, so the same amount of protein is a larger amount of food and usually a bit more cooking — a fact about the shopping rather than a verdict. Tofu, tempeh, seitan and soya mince are the compact exceptions. The other thing is that the amino acid make-up differs between plant foods, and the way that gets handled in practice is not complicated: eat a range of them across the day rather than building everything on one. Beans with rice or bread, lentils with pasta, soya and wheat in the same week. Most of the world has eaten this way for a very long time, which is why the pot dishes in the meal prep article are plant-based by default rather than by substitution.

Two rules make the shop go further and both hold whatever the prices are doing, which is why they are here and no prices are. The first: dried pulses go further per gram of protein than tinned, because a tin is mostly water, water is the heaviest thing in the shop, you paid to ship it, and then you pour it down the sink. Dried red split lentils are the easy entry point — no soaking, about twenty minutes on the hob, and they will thicken a pot of anything.

Dried beans are the exception that has to be done properly, and this is the one paragraph here that can make somebody ill. Dried beans, red kidney beans above all, contain a lectin that has to be destroyed by cooking. The Food Standards Agency's method is to soak them for at least twelve hours, drain and rinse, cover with fresh water, boil them hard for at least ten minutes, then simmer for around forty-five minutes to an hour until tender. Do not slow-cook raw kidney beans — a slow cooker does not get hot enough to destroy the toxin and can make matters worse. If that is more planning than your week has in it, tinned beans have already been through exactly that process, which is a good part of what you are paying for. Either choice is fine. Skipping the boil is not.

The second rule: every step somebody else has done for you is paid for per gram. A whole chicken against the same weight in diced breast. A block of cheese against a bag of it grated. Dried rice against a microwave pouch. A whole cabbage against a bag of it shredded. One big pot of yoghurt against four small ones. None of the convenient versions is worse food — you are buying labour, and it is worth knowing when you are. The counterweight matters more than the rule, though: the cheapest food in the shop is the food you actually eat. A bag of pre-chopped vegetables that gets cooked on Wednesday beats a whole swede that goes soft in the drawer, and a cooked chicken on a night when the alternative was a takeaway is a good buy at any price.

The freezer aisle is the most underrated part of the shop for anyone with an unpredictable week. Frozen vegetables and frozen fish are usually frozen within hours of being picked or caught, they need no planning, and they do not rot, so the bag you did not use on Tuesday is still there on Sunday. Frozen spinach, peas, broad beans, edamame, mixed veg, berries for the oats. Tinned tomatoes, tinned pulses, tinned fish. None of it is a lesser version of fresh; it is a different form of the same food, and it is why a stocked cupboard means you always have a meal.

Variety is the thing people ask for and then solve in the hardest possible way, by hunting for new recipes. Rotate inside the roles instead. Same tray bake, different spice. Same pot of lentils, coconut milk one week and tinned tomatoes the next. Same bowl, a yoghurt-and-lemon sauce instead of hummus. The meal prep article makes the point that two sauces turn three components into a week that does not taste like one meal, and that is the whole trick — four anchors, three bases, a drawer of vegetables and half a dozen sauces is already more combinations than there are days.

One number worth having, because it is the one most people in this country are furthest from and the remedy is always to eat more of something. The NHS puts the recommendation for adults at 30g of fibre a day, and notes that most adults manage about 20. Pulses, wholegrains, oats, potatoes with the skin on, nuts, fruit and vegetables are where it comes from, and the practical version is not a plan: a tin of something in the pot, the wholemeal version of the bread or pasta you were buying anyway, and leaving the skins on. If you are increasing it, do it over a couple of weeks rather than overnight — going from 20 to 30 in a single day is uncomfortable enough to put people off for years.

The last thing, and it is the one that genuinely changes depending on what you are doing. The same amount of energy can be a very different amount of food. That is just the arithmetic from the calories article, where fat carries more than twice what protein and carbohydrate do per gram, and water carries none at all. The direction that matters for most people reading this is the one Start Here names: if you are training four or five times a week and struggling to eat enough, appetite is your limiting factor, and a very large plate of very wet food will beat you. Milk, yoghurt, oats, peanut butter, dried fruit, nuts, tinned fish on toast, a bowl of dal — food that is compact, and food you can drink, gets the job done on a day when you are not hungry and still have to eat. That is a mechanism, not a promise, and it is the only direction we are going to write it in.

Cook the components, buy the frozen version of whatever you keep wasting, learn two sauces properly, and put a tin of something in most pots. That is the whole shop. Nothing in this article is a reason to eat less.

This is for adults keeping a religious fast, such as Ramadan, who want to keep training through it. It is not about fasting to change your weight, which is not something this guide recommends, and nothing in it is a reason to eat less. If you are under 18, talk to a parent or carer and your GP before you fast and train at the same time; this article is not written for you.

Some people should talk to a GP before they fast at all, never mind train. NHS guidance on fasting safely names people with diabetes, anyone taking prescribed medicines, people with long-term conditions that are not well controlled, people who are pregnant or breastfeeding, and anyone with a physical or mental illness. If you take a medicine, keep taking it: the same guidance says to ask your GP or pharmacist whether the dose or the timing should change, not to change it yourself. And if you have, or have had, an eating disorder, please talk to your GP before fasting.

Where to put the session. Training is easier in the hours when you can eat and drink. Two times tend to work: shortly before the meal that ends the fast, so you can eat and drink straight afterwards, or an hour or two after that meal, once it has settled. Training in the middle of a long fasting day, with no food or water for hours either side, is the hardest version, and the last sets are where it shows.

What to change. Keep your main lifts and do fewer sets of them. A fast is not the month to chase new bests: hold your numbers, take a set or two off each lift, and drop the extra work at the end of the session first. Rest a little longer between sets. Most people find their strength comes back quickly once they are eating and drinking normally again.

Eating and drinking. Spread your drinks across the hours you can drink rather than trying to catch up in one go; the NHS guidance is to drink plenty of water before and after the fast and to go easy on caffeinated drinks. Include protein at both meals rather than leaving it all to one. This article deliberately gives no amounts, because they depend on you.

Stop if you feel unwell. If you feel dizzy, faint, confused or unwell while training fasted, stop the session. The NHS guidance says that breaking a fast when you become unwell is permitted, to avoid harm, and a missed session costs nothing next to that.

And the line from Start Here belongs here too. If food is becoming something to control rather than something to eat, Beat runs free helplines and online support at beateatingdisorders.org.uk, and a GP is a reasonable first conversation.