Building muscle and strength before surgery can help you increase your metabolic rate, decrease your level of body fat, and help your body be better prepared to cope with the upcoming demands of surgery. Although gaining weight is fairly easy, gaining muscle can be somewhat challenging--the trick is increasing your dietary consumption just enough to gain weight without allowing your body to gain a high level of unwanted fat in the process. This is accomplished by manipulating both the quantity and the quality of the foods you consume.
Instructions
1. Use a notebook or computer file to write down your food consumption for a three-day period prior to beginning your muscle-gaining diet. This will give you a good idea of how high you should adjust calories.
2. Average out the total caloric consumption for the three-day period to find out how many calories you are eating per day. Add 300 to that number to calculate your daily caloric goal for a muscle-building diet. Your goal during the diet is to consume that many calories every day, spread out across four or five smaller meals.
3. Consume most of your calories (at least 90 percent) from clean, natural foods like plain meats, fruits, vegetables and natural fat sources like almonds, oils and avocados. Although you are trying to gain weight and eat more calories, this is not a license to hit your caloric goal by any means necessary, as consumption of nutrient-poor foods like sugars and processed foods will be more likely to result in fat gain. Eat clean to gain the most muscle and the least fat possible, relying on bodybuilding staples like steak and sweet potatoes, oatmeal, protein powders, chicken breasts, eggs and copious amounts of vegetables.
4. Weigh yourself at the end of every week, aiming for a gain of at least 1 pound. If you are not gaining weight on schedule and you have been following the diet exactly, increase your daily caloric intake by another 300 calories. Conversely, if you find that you are gaining weight too quickly, decrease your total calories by 100 or 200 to try to find that balance between maximizing muscle gain and minimizing fat gain.
