The Best High

If you’re trying to bulk up, what foods should you eat? The obvious answer is to eat high-calorie foods, making it easier to get into a calorie surplus. That’s true. But there’s a catch, especially if you’re trying to build muscle quickly, leanly, and healthfully.

We’ve been helping skinny guys bulk up for over a decade now. We’ve each gained over 60 pounds. Marco has studied under the top experts and worked with professional and Olympic athletes. Plus, there’s a rich bulking tradition we can draw wisdom from.

If you’re smart with your food choices, bulking becomes much easier. You’ll find it more comfortable to eat in a calorie surplus, build muscle faster, store less fat, have fuller muscles, better workout performance, and bigger muscle pumps.

You can bulk up with a wide variety of foods. You don’t need to eat a specific diet. You just need to eat enough good food. Even so, some foods make it much easier to bulk than others. They share a few common characteristics:

Not every good bulking food satisfies all three criteria. For example, carrots and spinach aren’t rich in calories or easy to digest, but they’re packed full of micronutrients, including nitrates, giving us bigger muscle pumps and increasing our rate of muscle growth (study). You could make a similar argument for garlic, which improves blood flow.

On the other side of the spectrum, consider white rice. White rice is stripped of its fibre, making it less nutritious than other whole grains, such as brown rice, oats, quinoa, and corn. However, it still retains some micronutrients and has a few key bulking advantages: it’s high in starchy carbs, easy to prepare, easy to eat, and quick to digest. As a result, it makes for a great side, especially if you’re having it along with some salmon and vegetables or perhaps under a bed of stir fry, picadillo, or vindaloo.

A good bulking diet is wide, varied, and made up of balanced meals. A balanced meal combines different categories of foods, mixing protein, carbs, fat, fibre, and micronutrients into a delicious dish. Even better if that dish is easy to down and easier to digest.

Get four bulking recipes in a downloadable PDF file. Get the full explanation, ingredient list, macros, and steps to follow.

One of our most popular articles is about how to eat a good bulking diet. It covers all the most important principles—how to choose nutritious foods, what macros to aim for, how to calculate your calorie needs, how to adjust those calories based on your results (or lack thereof), and so much more.

However, it doesn’t give many examples of good bulking meals, and it doesn’t have any recipes. That’s where this article comes in. These are some of my favourite bulking meals. I’ve used them to gain 70 pounds, and we’ve been using them with clients for over a decade now. I’ll give you recipes for all of them, with the calories and macros calculated out.

Bulking meals need to have enough calories and protein, giving you the energy and amino acids you need to build muscle. That means we’re looking for high-calorie meals with at least 30–40 grams of protein—often more. Snacks can have less, but that’s a topic for another article.

These meals should also be easy on your appetite. It’s hard to eat enough calories to gain weight, especially if you’re like me, with the metabolism and stomach size of a hummingbird. So, it helps to have calorically dense meals that fit easily into smaller stomachs, digest quickly, and leave you feeling hungry again soon.

The meals should have a balanced mix of carbs and fat, ideally leaning more towards starchy carbs. Both carbs and fats are rich in energy, vitamins, and minerals, but they each boast different benefits:

We also want to foster a healthy gut microbiome, improving digestive power and health. Probiotics from fermented foods can help with that, but the strongest evidence is for prebiotics—fibre. Ideally, you’d have at least ten grams of fibre per thousand calories. Even better if that fibre comes from several different sources.

Finally, a nutritious bulking diet is rich in a balanced mix of micronutrients. A good bulking meal is made from minimally processed foods that are rich in vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, nitrates, and other phytonutrients. This means getting calories from a mix of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, dairy, meat, seafood, spices, coffee, tea, and so on.