What is Anabolic Cooking?
Everyone is fond of talking about how weight loss and muscle building is achieved — 20% exercise, and 80% diet and nutrition. Anabolic cooking is all about getting your body into an anabolic state and maintaining that state.
This is the state where your body takes the nutrients that you’ve consumed and uses them to build complex substances like muscles and healthy tissues. This is the opposite of a catabolic state when the body breaks down substances into their basic forms.
In a hurry? Check out our top choice:
Our Top Choice
Anabolic Cooking
Imagine enjoying all your favorite foods, while addding more muscle then you thought was possible and still being able to see your six pack year round.
Summary
- Gain Muscle
- Burn Fat
- While Eating Brownies
As we get older, it gets more difficult to maintain that anabolic state because the body becomes less efficient in nutrient processing. This is why anabolic cooking becomes so important — because it enables us to compensate for our body’s own lack of efficiency as it gets older.
About the Author: Dave Ruel
Dave Ruel has been a name in the competitive bodybuilding circuit since 2006 and his love for bodybuilding, nutrition, and cooking has earned him the nickname “The Muscle Cook.”
His recipe for success includes eating clean and doing cardio all year round, and including a lean protein with every meal, which is what his Anabolic Cooking cookbook is all about.
Who is Anabolic Cooking For?
Anabolic cooking is for anyone who wants to build muscle, lose fat, and improve their eating habits. The recipes are simple but tasty, and they’re specifically designed for people who don’t have the time or the inclination to cook multiple times every single day. Even if all you want to do is start eating a little bit healthier, this is the cookbook for you.
What is Included?
When you purchase the Anabolic Cooking book, you don’t just get the collection of healthy recipes — there is an enormous variety of bonuses that come with it.
Product — Anabolic Cooking Book
The Anabolic Cooking book is a collection of 200+ recipes designed to help you lose fat and build muscle. The recipes can easily carry you from your first breakfast meal to all the way to your desert at the end of the night.
The electronic book itself is formatted very well — each recipe has its own page, so you’re not accidentally mixing up your recipes when you’re trying to cook — and each recipe has a list of ingredients, instructions, and nutrition facts in the lower right hand corner of each page which is ideal if you’re counting calories or monitoring your protein or carbohydrate intake.
Bonuses
Quick Start Guide
The quick-start guide is the perfect tool for anyone who’s just getting started on their healthy eating journey. It breaks down everything from nutrition for muscle building to grocery shopping and meal preparation to help you get started.
It also has a ton of great information that really helps you break down all that data that’s provided on a food’s nutrition labels so you can learn how to make the best food choices even when you’re not using the cookbook’s recipes.
This might not be a great tool for people who are already aware of the type of foods that they need to put in their bodies, but it’s a fantastic tool for nutrition newbies or anyone who needs a quick refresher course.
Meal Plans
If you hate trying to figure out what to make for dinner every night, or find yourself staring at the fridge when you’re trying to come up with something for breakfast, this is the best bonus you could hope for.
There are two different types of meal plans available — ones for fat loss, and ones for lean muscle gain so there’s something here for everyone.
Each type of meal plan has a variety of different options depending on the number of calories that you need to consume each day to reach your goal. The lean muscle meal plans, for example, range from 2000 to 5000 calories, where the fat loss plans range from 1200 to 3000 daily calories.
But what if you don’t know how many calories you should be eating every day? That’s where the Calorie Calculator comes in.
Calorie Calculator
This is a very straightforward tool, so we’re not going to spend a lot of time on it. This tool helps you figure out the best daily calorie intake on your workout plan, your gender, your body weight, your current body fat percentage, and your activity level. It provides a detailed outline of your body composition, as well as your calorie and nutrition intake for your training days and non training days.
You might need to break out your tape measure to help estimate your body fat percentage if you don’t have a set of skinfold calipers handy, but the calculator works with estimates as well.
Food & Training Logs
You might have the willpower to eat healthy all day long, but if you don’t record your food and training habits, you don’t have anything keeping you accountable on those days when all you want is a donut or a Big Mac.
Anabolic Cooking has you covered there too with printable food and training logs.
The nutrition logs are broken down into 6 daily meals with sections to note protein, carbs, fats, and calories, with an additional section for your post-workout nutrition. The page is only designed for a single day so you’ll need to print one out for each day that you keep track of your nutrition.
The training logs are broken down into the set number, which exercise you’re doing, the number of reps, and the amount of weight. There are also sections for whether or not you did cardio, as well as your location and current weight.
Just print out your logs, slap them into a three ring binder, and you’re good to go!
The Ugly Truth About Supplements
The final bonus is an informative piece about workout supplements and whether or not they actually work. There’s a ton of good information here which boils down to this — while there are some supplements that work, you don’t have to take them to lose weight or gain muscle and any supplements that promise drastic transformations are, in Dave’s words, bullshit.
Dave has also collected a list of his favorite supplements, so you have a good idea of where to start if you’re planning to add supplements to your diet.
In a hurry? Check out our top choice:
Our Top Choice
Anabolic Cooking
Imagine enjoying all your favorite foods, while addding more muscle then you thought was possible and still being able to see your six pack year round.
Summary
- Gain Muscle
- Burn Fat
- While Eating Brownies
Recipe Categories
Now we get to the meat and potatoes of the matter — the recipes. We’ll break each section down into its component parts (ingredients?) and let you know what we think.
Breakfast
Breakfast always brings to mind sweet favorites like oatmeal, pancakes, and banana bread and you can enjoy all of those and more without sacrificing your healthy eating. Most of the oatmeal recipes, for example, rely on skim milk and protein powder paired with oats to bring all that healthy fiber into your diet.
The banana bread recipe replaces flour with 6 scoops of protein powder to create a sweet, high protein treat. There are even low-carb recipes for things like hash browns, replacing the traditional potato with shredded zucchini.
There are also a ton of egg-friendly recipes from omelets and scrambles to full blown frittatas so you can enjoy all those yummy egg whites!
Chicken and Poultry
Chicken and other lean poultry is a go-to for anyone who is trying to lose weight or gain muscle, but eating chicken every single day can get a bit boring. You’ll never get bored with the fantastic variety of chicken and poultry recipes — you’ve got everything from grilled chicken and spinach to chicken parmesan and even healthy chicken nuggets!
Ground chicken and turkey are staples of this section of the recipe book as well.
Red Meat and Pork
Red meat isn’t terribly lean but it is fantastically high in protein and there are plenty of ways to cook it thanks to the third section of the Anabolic Cooking book. Lean ground beef is a good vehicle for these recipes, but many of them call for other lean red meats like bison, as well as pork chops and other lean pork products.
Whether you like Asian cuisine, Mexican flavors, or classic flavors like meatloaf, this recipe book has got something for every meat lover.
Fish and Seafood
You can’t ask for a better lean protein than fish and seafood. For fish, these recipes tend to rely heavily on salmon, with a few tilapia and halibut recipes thrown in, as well as some crab and shrimp recipes that are simply to die for.
You’ve also got a great list of tuna recipes for those days when fish is on the menu but all you have time to do is open up a tuna can.
Soups, Sides, Salads and Others
Salads are your stereotypical ‘healthy eating’ food but there’s nothing stereotypical about these flavorful recipes. The salads cover every flavor palette from chicken and spinach to curry and everything in between. This section is also filled with all the mashed potato recipes that you could ever want, which is perfect when you just need some tasty carbs.
Soups are a great way to enjoy flavor filled foods without piling on the calories. Chicken soups, seafood gumbos, and other mind-blowing flavors are fantastic. Soups are great for meal planning too because you can make a big batch and they freeze very well, making meal planning simpler.
Snacks and Bars
Snacks are an essential part of every healthy diet, but you don’t have to spend your days snacking on celery or other flavorless plain vegetables. This section is filled with protein bar recipes, protein cookies, and even high protein snack wrap recipes to make it easier to get through the day. You can even make high protein Jello for those days when you really have a sweet tooth!
Deserts
You don’t need tons of sugar to enjoy a good desert, which is exactly what the Anabolic Cooking book is here to teach you. You’ve got recipes for strawberry meringues made with protein powder or a tasty lemon cheesecake that replaces the sugary cream cheese with cottage cheese instead.
There are plenty of recipes here to satisfy any sweet tooth, and keep you from reaching for that Snickers bar or that pint of chocolate ice cream.
In a hurry? Check out our top choice:
Our Top Choice
Anabolic Cooking
Imagine enjoying all your favorite foods, while addding more muscle then you thought was possible and still being able to see your six pack year round.
Summary
- Gain Muscle
- Burn Fat
- While Eating Brownies
Conclusion
The Anabolic Cooking book is a great tool for anyone who needs to get a bit healthier or who already eat healthy and just wants to add some new recipes to their repertoire. It’s also a fantastic value — while it’s originally $47, it’s currently on sale for $9. Yes, you read that right — everything that we’ve listed above, the cookbook and all the bonuses, for less than the cost of a fancy coffee from Starbucks.
Overall, if you’ve got a spare $9 and are concerned at all about healthy cooking, this cook book should be in your library. The book and its bonuses are an invaluable tool for everyone, no matter your level of knowledge.
