If you’ve come here looking for a simple weekly meal plan, bulking recipes or shredding recipes, you’re in the right place.
We have people ask us all the time, “how can you use meal prep for muscle gain?”. Well, to be honest, the meal prep doesn’t directly have too much to do with it! Meal preparation is simply a tool you can use to ensure you’ll actually stick to your lean diet.
The key is building a habit, that’s where you’ll see results through lean meal preparation.
How can you start changing your habits?
Meal prep, after all, is one of the best ways to save money on your diet as well as making it healthy and sustainable overall. The old-time saying that often gets flung around all too often ‘the best diet is the one you stick to’, definitely has some truth to it. In our experience, ‘hardcore’ dieting, almost always leads to fat gain immediately after the completion of the diet, which obviously isn’t what we want.
The most effective way to start building positive muscle building diet habits is simply through doing. Head to the shops once a week, purchase your ingredients, then cook. Split these meals into separate containers, then freeze them. Do this once every week, and your cooking is done!
That sounds great! But how do I make sure I actually stay with this long term?
What’s the key to sustainable meal prep?
Consistency, that’s the key! First, it might be a struggle, but after roughly 4 weeks of consistent meal prep, you won’t know any different.
Having some ‘go to’ recipes that you can easily prepare in no more than 20 minutes, is essential to saving money on healthy eating. Through routine meal prep, you’ll forge an incredibly healthy habit, and hopefully, you’ll be able to curb the habit of eating calorie dense food too often. You will stay lean when these healthy habits are coupled with routine exercise.
What if I have a specific goal in mind?
You may have come here looking for ‘bulking recipes’ or ‘shredding recipes’, or some form of meal plan. The truth is the same lean meal prep concepts can be applied to your situation no matter your goal. The one thing you will have to alter is the portion sizes.
If you want to use meal prep for bulking, you should split your recipe batch into fewer containers. If you want to use meal prep for shredding, you should split your recipe into more containers. This is a great way to maintain a calorie controlled bodybuilding diet that’s sustainable.
But aren’t there other things to consider?
In reality, meal prep will only make up a percentage of your overall diet. You’ll still have to fill the rest of your daily calorie needs with ‘snacks’. This is where our app can be a huge help. We provide you with the lean meal prep recipes along with a huge list of snacks. You set your daily calorie goal (via our calculator in the app), then fill your daily calorie needs with our recipes and snacks. You can plan out your entire month of meal prep right from our app.
How will these recipes help me?
Easy meal prep recipes are essential in your quest for kitchen domination. Making your prep easy is the biggest thing you can do, to ensure you will stick to it long term. Cooking and meal prep doesn’t have to be hard. It also doesn’t have to be tasteless, in fact, quite the opposite is true. You can actually make some really tasty, nutritious and cheap meals using our preparation methods.
By meal prepping using healthy, whole foods, your path to weight loss is much more likely. Our stomachs feel much, much more satisfied when we consume whole foods, as opposed to processed foods. You can actually be much more satisfied, whilst eating fewer calories when sticking to a meal prep regime. Whether your using meal prep for muscle gain or for fat loss, it’s important to have accurate feedback from our stomachs regarding our intake of energy.
You shouldn’t care what others might think.
Sure, the meals you’re going to be prepping aren’t going to win any reality cooking TV competitions, but they will save you money. You also will save time, and you’ll even enjoy the meals more in the long run, trust us.
So let’s actually take a look at some meal prep ideas for weight loss and muscle gain!
High protein beef meal prep recipe
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High protein chicken meal prep recipe
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Now obviously, there are thousands of recipes out there. Whether you’re looking for bulking recipes, shredding recipes or anything else, you will run into thousands of diets that claim to ‘hack’ your body into losing weight and gaining muscle.
The hard facts are something the fitness industry doesn’t really want you to hear. No, fat burners and other ridiculous supplements, are not going to be effective. No there isn’t really a ‘secret’ to shredding, or bulking, or cutting or whatever you want to call it.
The fundamentals have been the same for years, and will continue to be the same for many more to come! We’ve created our entire program to make this process easier for you. By providing 2 new meal prep recipes each week, then allowing you to tailor their portion sizes to your calorie goal with our app, you’ll soon learn that this process isn’t that hard!
Should I focus on meal prep for weight loss and muscle gain rather purchasing expensive supplements?
At The Clean 5, we despise a greedy fitness industry harvesting money from individuals that lack the ‘know how’ to actually change their diet for the better. A sustainable change to your diet consisting of whole foods, will have 10,000 times the impact on your body composition, compared to BS supplements such as ‘fat burners’ and ‘test boosters’.
If you can take two things away from this article, let them be this;
- The best diet is the one that you stick to
- If it seems too good to be true, it probably is
If you’re interested in getting 2 new meal prep recipes each week head here.
We offer our plans through our app, for $5 per week. We also include a ‘meal planner’ system and calorie calculator, so you can plan your week and access our new recipes.
If finding meal prep ideas for muscle gain is a regular issue for you, then checking out our app could be a good move. We provide two new meal prep recipes each week, that help you meet your caloric needs, depending on your goal.
Beginners vs Experienced
Beginners, I have good news for you. Early gains are the best kind of gains! You have the rare capability to burn fat and gain muscle at the same time. Don’t take this for granted as this definitely isn’t the case long term.
Where you do need to work hard is creating new dietary habits. Changing your diet is by no means an easy task, but it is vitally important to your long term success. The best way to engrain new habits is to start small and build slowly. Rather than jumping into a full-on 7-day a week, no sugar or fat diet plan, start by just meal prepping your lunch for Monday to Friday. Once you feel like that has become routine, start prepping your dinner. Diving into the deep end usually doesn’t work for a number of reasons including a drastic change in calorie intake, cravings, and body clock adjustments.
For more experienced lifters and those who have already experienced meal prepping, the focus must shift. Very few of you will be able to ride the beginner’s wave of concurrent fat loss and muscle gain. That does not mean you must starve, or drastically over-eat to get results. It means you need to have a greater awareness of how your body is responding to your dietary and exercise habits. Being in a slight calorie surplus or deficit can be enough to create the energy changes required to drop or gain weight. Your best option is to find a calorie intake that maintains your current weight and then slightly adjusting it either way to suit your goal.
Regardless of experience, slow and steady always wins the race. Large changes in energy intake (either up or down), can throw the body out of whack. Your body will deal with small changes extremely well, whereas starving and over-consumption can produce large stress responses and/or rapid fat gain. Don’t take shortcuts!
Fat loss vs Muscle gain
As discussed previously, experienced lifters must choose whether to lose fat, gain muscle or to maintain their current conditioning. Regardless of the choice, one thing is for certain, protein intake must remain high. High protein intake (2-2.5g/kg of lean body mass) optimizes muscle gain during a calorie surplus and prevents muscle breakdown during a calorie deficit. Our recommendation is that you never reduce your protein intake during periods of intentional weight loss to avoid losing hard-earned muscle throughout the process. On the other hand, producing a caloric surplus through increased protein intake won’t necessarily make you superman, but it will certainly aid your muscle gaining ambitions.
No matter who you are, one thing that will always stand in the way of fat loss is hunger. Through sight, smell, taste, food volume, energy density, and absorption rates our body has a complex, yet a manageable way of stimulating hunger. Learning how to manage our senses is the key to producing long term dietary adaption. Food volume and absorption rates are two areas that are often missed when designing a meal plan. Feeling fuller for longer is a very easy way to minimize unnecessary hunger cravings. Increasing food volume, without increasing energy intake is easily done by including vegetables and avoiding highly processed foods. Vegetables carry very little calories, take up room in your stomach and slow our digestion rate. They are the perfect option for increasing food volume. Processed foods, however, have very high energy densities. They usually carry very little water and have very fast digestion rates. Limiting the inclusion of processed food will automatically reduce the amount of energy your body is able to take in.