Nowadays it is very fashionable to attribute “properties” to certain foods in order to obtain a specific benefit. It is believed that to lose fat you should eat vegetables and to gain muscle mass you should eat rice and chicken, and nothing could be further from the truth.

All foods, understanding that we base our diet on healthy food, have a place both to lose fat and to gain muscle mass. It is the proportion of these foods and their quantities that will make us gain or lose weight.

The key to gaining muscle mass is to ingest more kcal than we expend, that is to say, to be in surplus as well as to carry out a planned training for this objective, to control stress, sleep, among other things. Without this it is impossible to achieve it.

And, as we said before, although we assume that the food, we should eat to gain muscle mass should be healthy, in certain contexts, especially in athletes with high energy requirements we can benefit from the use of processed foods such as a chocolate shake. Because many times, making a surplus to gain muscle mass in this type of subjects can lead to gastrointestinal problems due to the amount of real food they must eat to achieve their goal.

And that is why, using certain ultra-processed foods is not good, it is much better option than doing the whole diet with real food. Or tell a person who trains CrossFit twice a day that between one session and another must eat a kilo of potatoes with broccoli to recover… Probably we will not get him to do the diet even a single day.