For years bodybuilders and those who were looking to simply increase their muscle mass used ultra low fat diets to help improve weight loss and improve muscle definition. Were they doing the right thing? And if not...Why?
Anyone who is young enough to remember the tasteless ultra low fat bodybuilding diets of the eighties and nineties will be pleased to know that those days are long gone,
anyone who cannot remember those tasteless days, thank your blessings!
However, as bad as those diets were, there are those who are still very much die-hard followers of these fat free diets, proclaiming them to be the perfect diet for building muscle and for improving one's health.
Although I would never call myself an expert in dietary requirements for building muscle, I do however possess a knowledge of what is healthy and about what your body requires in order to function well.
This accrued knowledge tells me that completely eliminating fat from your diet is hardly what I would call a good idea! Your body needs certain levels of fat to function correctly, but the term that needs to be stressed, and one you will need to take notice of, is...everything in moderation.
Why Cutting Fat Out of Your Diet Completely Is A Bad Idea
The best diets for building muscle will always contain some dietary fats so if you are trying to build muscle and are considering cutting fat completely out of your diet then don't, it is a terrible idea, and this is why...
1. Fats are absolutely essential for maintaining the correct levels of muscle building hormones such as testosterone. There are many foods such as beef and eggs, that contain the correct types of fat needed for testosterone creation, not eating these specific types of food will result in your testosterone levels becoming considerably lower.
2. It is important that any muscle building diet should include both saturated and unsaturated fats, again moderation is the important factor here. The better the balance of your diet the better your nutritional intake will be, and as a result your health will benefit, even if your goal isn't to build muscle.
3. A part of this perfect nutritional balance is the intake of certain fat soluble vitamins. Your body would be starved of these fat soluble vitamins if you cut fat out from your diet completely. An extremely low fat or completely fat free diet will make it extremely difficult for your body to obtain vital vitamins A, D, E, and K, all of which play a large part in the process of increasing muscle mass.
In short, if you want to build new muscle effectively your body will need to be in the best condition possible and if you don't take in certain levels of the right kind of fats...it never will be!
