A Few New Tricks On Getting The Food In
By Trevor L. Smith
We have all been there, in the throws of a really good training cycle and a good pharmaceutical cycle, but the gains are not what you expect and the culprit is eating, or lack there of. Now I myself have gone through phases where I have eaten 12,000 calories a day and then times when I could barely get in 4000. Although supplements make things a lot easier, even these can be hard to consume if you are not particularly hungry. So I decided to take the time to share some of the methods I have used over the years and continue to use to get the food and protein in so I don't under-cut my progress.
As you know by now I am a BIG believer in protein and lots of it. Let's face it though, it is a hell of a lot easier to get in large quantities of carbs than it is protein if you don't have a few tricks, so here it goes. Protein drinks: Now I don't care if you are mixing them with water or with skim milk, the fact of the matter is, is when you blend or shake up a protein drink a huge amount of air gets mixed in with everything. The end result is that you wind up with a product that is almost twice as filling as it should be. Not realizing this, you drink it down and feel like you just had a lead ball dropped in your gut. Two hours later you are still as stuffed as a Christmas Turkey, so you wind up having to skip meals until you can eat comfortable. Either that or you try to force feed yourself and get sick and then really wind up having an aversion to food and supplements. Here's a tip and what I do each day.
Now since I take in around 800-900 grams of protein each day (please do not take this as a recommendation, it is what I do because I only take in 300 grams of carbs and I am also well over 300 pounds) what I do is first thing in the morning, mix 500 grams of Ultra-Pro 5 (you can use any protein powder you want and don't email me saying I am Bill Phillips because I mentioned my product, I mean who the hell else's protein do you think I am going to use) with 30 ounces of water and 40 ounces of skim milk. I use a hand blend to mix everything together and make sure all the powder is dissolved, then I let the whole thing site for 2 hours or so. This allows the massive amount to air that was mixed in with the powder and liquid to float to the top and dissipate. After 2 hours you will actually see all the air bubbles on top of the liquid. This will allow me to consume only the protein powder and liquid it was mixed with and not excess air which bloats the sh*t out of me. Doing this I can easily consume 500 grams of protein each day just from powders alone.
Ground Beef: Now since I advocate low fat, I use 96% lean ground beef. The only problem is, is that it is as dry a piece of bread dropped in the middle of the desert. Very hard to get down because it is like eating sand. The way I get around this is to mix in some tomato sauce after it is cooked and then throw the whole mixture into the food processor. This mashes everything up into a easy to eat, baby food paste that tastes pretty good too. Eating a pound of lean beef this way is a hell of a lot easier than gagging down a dry burger patty.
Chicken: Again, chicken breasts are difficult to consume when they are just broiled. No taste, no juices equals another gag fest. The solution is to cook the chicken breast and then while they are hot drop them one at a time into a food process and chop them up into a fine chicken powder. You then take this ground up chicken powder and mix it in a pot with half a can of fat free cream of chicken soup and some water. The result is easy to eat, tasty cream of chicken baby food that is easy to spoon in and very easy for your system to digest, which of course means more nutrients getting to where they need to go.
Oatmeal and eggs: Again eaten separately and this can be very filling so what I do is take 10-12 egg whites along with a cup of oatmeal and a banana and some cinnamon, mix it all together to form a batter. I then pour it into two pans making two good sized pancakes. Once cooked they can be taken with you and eaten very easily. The perfect protein carb meal that tastes awesome. Of course, everything else that needs to be consumed in terms of carbohydrates is very easy to do because you can always drink your carbs to get in the excess calories If anybody has any other food suggestions please send them to me and I will post them each month. We'll call it recipe of the month
