Volume 1: Muscle building oatmeal!

Alec Enkiri | 2/11/20

In fitness 90% of your results will be determined by diet and only the remaining 10% by how you train. The simple fact of the matter is you can't out train a bad diet.

Okay, people say that all the time but I can't keep even type it with a straight face because it's patent fucking bullshit. Regardless, however, what you eat is still very important and you will never make optimal gains in the gym without optimal nutrition to go along with it. I would never be so bold as to assign an arbitrary percentage that I pulled straight out of my asshole like many people do, but the two aspects do run parallel to each other in an infinite sort of fashion and you can't really have one without the other when it comes to building muscle and strength, getting lean/ripped, or just improving overall health and fitness.

On that note, people ask me about my diet all the time. They want to know how I stay so lean all the time yet still manage to build muscle and continue to build strength and hit personal best lifts - without using drugs and without gaining absurd amounts of body weight or body fat - even after a decade of hard training. I've talked about my diet in the past in a couple YouTube videos (description of my diet back in 2015 and again in 2018), just a sample day of eating detailing the typical sorts of meals I eat along with the macronutrient breakdown, but given that there has been so much interest in the subject I thought it would be a cool new addition to the web site if I started putting up some of my favorite recipes every now and then. Believe it or not, I have actually learned how to cook a few things pretty well (people love my cooking, true story) and I've figured out how to streamline and simplify a few recipes that were passed down through my family while also making them healthier and more conducive to building muscle and strength in the process.

And in the future we'll get to a few of my favorites! For now, however, I want to start with a breakfast favorite of mine that literally anybody can make. This one isn't really cooking per se, but it makes for a nice and healthy staple breakfast that you can throw together in a pinch pretty much any day of the week. It's cheap, it's delicious, it's chock full of healthy fats, quality carbs, and plenty of protein, and it'll fuel you up for your day as well as for your training later on. And best of all you don't have to fancy yourself a gourmet chef or even a skilled cook of any sort to be able to throw this one together. Allow me to introduce my muscle building oatmeal!

ingredients

Step 1

Dump the oats (1 cup) into a microwave safe bowl and then add the whole milk (2 cups). Heat it up until the oats get nice and soft and start to meld together with the milk. I do 3 minutes on the dot in my microwave and it comes out perfectly.  

Step 2

Pour the scoop of whey protein and as much cinnamon as you desire directly into oatmeal and stir them through until they're nice and smooth and all the clumps have been mixed through. I recommend adding a good amount of cinnamon as it's quite healthy for you and adds a delicious element of taste as well.

Step 3

Add the frozen blueberries into the mix while the oatmeal is still nice and hot. This will melt the blueberries down a little bit and make them the perfect texture, as well as help to spread some of that yummy blueness throughout the oats as well. 

Oats with whey protein mixed in.

Now add some cinnamon to the mix!

Step 4

Add the shredded coconut (4 tbsp), raw sliced almonds (2 tbsp), and raw chopped walnuts (2 tbsp).

Other nut varieties work well here also, like pecans for example. The important part is to make sure you buy nuts that are intended for cooking purposes as they will be pre-sliced as well as raw, which means there is no additional poopy fat added from vegetable oils used for roasting the nuts. They taste just as good raw in this application and they are better for you this way so that is what I recommend.

Additionally, and I will say this product is often tough to find, be sure to use unsweetened shredded coconut. Sweetened coconut flakes can be found in any grocery store, but that's stupid. Unsweetened coconut flakes are often like searching for a unicorn and as much as I'd rather peel the skin off of my face than visit this particular hellhole, Wal-Mart reliably carries an organic unsweetened bag of it under their own brand. Be sure to stock up so you don't have to go back for another 6 months. 

Ready for stirring!

Step 5

And finally if you need a little bit of extra sweetness in addition to the protein powder, or you plan to do a particularly tough or high volume workout later that day, then feel free to add a bit of raw honey into the mix as well. I generally use about 1/2 tbsp myself, which only adds 8 grams of sugar to the whole meal, but I'll occasionally go up to a full tbsp if I'm planning to do a particularly tough workout that evening or if I have a lot of movement based activities planned for that day.

Macronutrient Breakdown

Boom. There ya go. Muscle building oatmeal! Cheap, delicious, super easy, super quick, and it packs one hell of a nutritional wallop. If you train hard and sometimes struggle to get in enough clean, high quality carbs, healthy fats, and complete proteins then this breakfast might be something worth trying. If you do give it a whirl definitely let me know what you think about it!

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