Every guide to bulking focuses on "not eating enough", on macro quality and so on, but this is one of those cart-before-horse things. None of this matters if your calorie math is off, or if your nutrition facts labels are distorting how many calories you're actually getting, and this is a much more practical concern than whether your intake of polyunsaturated fatty acids encourage greater protein synthesis than saturated fatty acids.
So if you buy, say, 4lb of chicken leg quarters at the supermarket, you might do calorie math like this: there are ~450g in one lb, so there are 1800g total, and each 2oz serving has 13g protein, so that's like 825g of protein per purchase.
Wrong. Dead wrong. Nutrition facts don't have to list what you're actually getting after you cook the chicken. All they have to list is the nutrition facts of what they're currently selling. Yes, it might be true that the current package has that much protein, but you are not getting that much protein, because you are cooking it. When you cook chicken, it's going to decrease by weight significantly -- a lot of the water and fat will go away as well.
I usually buy 3-4lb of leg quarters, because those are the cheapest at my supermarket. I then measured out the cooked chicken on a gram scale. There are five leg quarters in total. After discarding what I didn't use or didn't eat, I had something like 125g of usable meat per quarter, and 75g of trash.
In other words, what a layperson might think was 1300g or 1800g was actually 625 of meat. This came out to something like 145g of usable protein, for an unnecessary long period of preparation and cooking.
When I did the math and scaled all of my purchases to $1.50 proportions, I had spent $1.50 for about 65g of protein. I can get the same goddamned protein, with better fats (polyunsaturated) from eating fucking chub mackerel out of a can.
Bro.
And the worst part? I don't even LIKE chicken. I fucking hate chicken. I've eaten so much goddamned chicken in my life that I don't even hate chicken enough to spitefully kill and eat chickens. I hate chicken so much that I can't even be Chicken Hitler. I sincerely don't want to remember it exists anymore.
Fuck chicken.
But anyway.
You're trying to eat cleaner. You might think something like quinoa is good for clean bulking because, hey, it has a great nutrient profile. So you do this:
and then you think you're going to go into clean bulk heaven.
If you're observant you'll see the part where it says "uncooked." In other words, this is a completely pointless calorie metric, because no one is going to eat quinoa uncooked unless their teeth are made of discarded adamantium from wolverine's claws.
So what happens when you boil it, like every human being on the planet is going to do?
The calorie count is reduced to a third of its original amount.
I write a lot of long shit. This is not a long post, comparatively. There is one takeaway here:
Unless you're eating everything raw, you probably cook some things you eat, and you should track calories of food after it's been cooked. Merely looking at the calorie count online without this specific information does not give you an accurate picture, and can screw up your bulk or cut hard by founding your decisions on very wrong information.
So if you buy, say, 4lb of chicken leg quarters at the supermarket, you might do calorie math like this: there are ~450g in one lb, so there are 1800g total, and each 2oz serving has 13g protein, so that's like 825g of protein per purchase.
Wrong. Dead wrong. Nutrition facts don't have to list what you're actually getting after you cook the chicken. All they have to list is the nutrition facts of what they're currently selling. Yes, it might be true that the current package has that much protein, but you are not getting that much protein, because you are cooking it. When you cook chicken, it's going to decrease by weight significantly -- a lot of the water and fat will go away as well.
I usually buy 3-4lb of leg quarters, because those are the cheapest at my supermarket. I then measured out the cooked chicken on a gram scale. There are five leg quarters in total. After discarding what I didn't use or didn't eat, I had something like 125g of usable meat per quarter, and 75g of trash.
In other words, what a layperson might think was 1300g or 1800g was actually 625 of meat. This came out to something like 145g of usable protein, for an unnecessary long period of preparation and cooking.
When I did the math and scaled all of my purchases to $1.50 proportions, I had spent $1.50 for about 65g of protein. I can get the same goddamned protein, with better fats (polyunsaturated) from eating fucking chub mackerel out of a can.
Bro.
And the worst part? I don't even LIKE chicken. I fucking hate chicken. I've eaten so much goddamned chicken in my life that I don't even hate chicken enough to spitefully kill and eat chickens. I hate chicken so much that I can't even be Chicken Hitler. I sincerely don't want to remember it exists anymore.
Fuck chicken.
But anyway.
You're trying to eat cleaner. You might think something like quinoa is good for clean bulking because, hey, it has a great nutrient profile. So you do this:
and then you think you're going to go into clean bulk heaven.
If you're observant you'll see the part where it says "uncooked." In other words, this is a completely pointless calorie metric, because no one is going to eat quinoa uncooked unless their teeth are made of discarded adamantium from wolverine's claws.
So what happens when you boil it, like every human being on the planet is going to do?
The calorie count is reduced to a third of its original amount.
I write a lot of long shit. This is not a long post, comparatively. There is one takeaway here:
Unless you're eating everything raw, you probably cook some things you eat, and you should track calories of food after it's been cooked. Merely looking at the calorie count online without this specific information does not give you an accurate picture, and can screw up your bulk or cut hard by founding your decisions on very wrong information.