Anabolic Cooking is a cookbook designed to cook healthy and nutritious meals in a practical and time-efficient way, particularly useful for people working out or without much time.
This review will reveal how this recipe and cooking guide works, what the recipes are like, and what the strategies are for food preparation and grocery shopping.
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Who Is It Suitable For?
Anabolic Cooking is basically a very useful blueprint on how to organize your cooking sessions so that you do not need to spend your life in the kitchen. This is especially handy to bodybuilders or weight lifters who need to spread out their calories in six small meals a day, rather than two or three.
All you have to do is preparing your weekly meals in one single cooking super-session, then store them in Tupperware for the rest of the week. This strategy helps save not just time, but money too as you buy your food not daily but wholesale.
This cookbook is designed to prevent stagnation or laziness in the nutrition department, both for bodybuilders and regular people.
As the name suggests, the Anabolic Cooking recipe book and the program are focused on anabolism, which is being in a state of positive calorie balance with a view to improving muscle mass while also reducing fat through a balanced selection of macronutrients (carbs, proteins, and fats).
It is therefore of particular interest to bodybuilders, but not only. The cookbook and the recipes can also be adjusted to anyone bored of unsavory healthy meals once you have found your calorie and food requirements, depending on your body type.
Unlike other cookbooks, the choice of recipes and nutrients balance is determined by your particular physique type. Such a fitness-like approach is the result of the author being a professional bodybuilder and fitness expert.
Anabolic Cooking was designed to make meals as easy as possible. Going through the book it becomes clear that Dave Ruel spent a great deal of effort to make the recipes not just healthy and tasty but also easy to implement.
Moreover, the book is written in layman terms, no need to be a chef, it contains a lot of information on shopping lists and foods. He basically organized the cookbook in a way to make it difficult to slip back to ready-made meals.
Anabolic Cooking is not just about recipes but it also illustrates all the step-by-step actions that go with it, such as where and how to do your grocery shopping, how to cut your raw foods, and even more important how to save cooking times.
How Does It Work?
According to Dave, foods make your muscle grow and fat burn. Right foods in the right quantity are necessary to make the most of your bodybuilding workouts, he claims, so he took inspiration from fellow athletes that introduced him to a new world of nutrition that did not need to be boring and tasteless but was in fact mouth-watering.
These meals were even better tasting than the food you’d normally eat at a restaurant but were also perfectly balanced in nutrition value so as to promote muscle growth and fat loss.
As he started practicing every day, he eventually got better and better with his skill and over the years he accumulated a wealth of a few hundred recipes to make ranging from breakfast to chicken and poultry, to beef, pork, fish, seafood, salads, soups, snacks, and even bars and desserts.
He then went on to categorize his recipes and filtered them to meet all the following 3 criteria:
They must be easy to do.
They must be tasty and flavorsome.
They must be nutritionally balanced so as to promote muscle building and fat loss.
Out of several hundred recipes, only about 200 made it to his anabolic cookbook. The remaining were either nutritious but difficult to make, or tasty but not nutritionally balanced, and so on. This is a large enough number of recipes for all occasions to give enough variation and avoid boredom.
Dave Ruel’s cookbook for bodybuilders is very useful not just from a nutritional standpoint but also a practical one. It does not give instructions on how exactly you should structure your meal plans, however, it gives you the information you need to calculate your daily calorie intake through handy software, depending on your body type and lifestyle.
Different Diets For Different Bodies
Different body types need different nutritional requirements because they have different ways to process food for functioning. The main body types are, of course, ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph. As a general rule, here is a quick breakdown of the average food composition for these 3 body types:
Ectomorph (the slim, skinny type)- An emphasis on carbohydrates more so than the other 2 body types, meaning a food composition of about 50% %, 30% proteins, and 20% fats, healthy fats.
Mesomorph (the naturally proportioned, athletic type) – All macronutrients have a more balanced structure, with 35% of food coming from carbs, 35% from proteins, and 30% from fats.
Endomorph (the stocky, weight lifter type) – macronutrients should shift towards little carbs, 25%, 35 % proteins, and more fats for energy, 40%.
Food Preparation And Organization
The most difficult part of any dieting regime and meal planning is not just cooking the food itself, but prepare it in an organized way to minimize time expenditure. Cooking three small portions per day takes a lot of effort and time and clashes with life.
The solution suggested in Anabolic Cooking is getting a single grocery shopping a week and dedicating 2/3 hours in a single session to cook and prepare the whole weekly meals. This requires getting seal-tight containers and Tupperware to store all your individual meals in the refrigerator for easy consumption later.
For anyone busy with regular working life and bodybuilding commitments it is the only way to go unless you happen to have tons of free time at hand.
Anabolic Cooking Recipes
Once you have worked out your body type and nutrients balance, you are met with a vast array of recipes to choose from the different sections, each one treating a different topic.
For example, meat is divided into poultry, beef, and pork chapters, with recipes such as
Crispy Chicken Nuggets
Roasted Chicken Breast With Spinach And Walnut Stuffing
Muscle Building Mini Meat Loaves
Beef Stroganoff
Baked Meatballs
Beef Cubano
Chicken Cacciatore
Snacks are protein-based, such as
High Protein Pancakes
Fudge Protein Bars
Protein Waffles
Vanilla Blueberry Muffins
High Protein Banana Bread
Fish recipes include
Creole Tilapia
Poached Halibut
And how to make the most of good old tuna fish.
Breakfast recipes include
Low Carb Spinach Scramble
Low Carb Zucchini Hash Browns
Apple Pie Oats
This is just a tiny stub of the huge variety of recipes included in Anabolic Cooking, there are also more chapters on Soups, Salads, and Desserts.
Given the wide range of possible end-users, Anabolic Cooking contains two distinct parts on muscle building and fat loss respectively. The first is called Lean Muscle Mass Plans and is geared towards being in a positive anabolic state for muscle building.
General guidelines advocate for high-calorie consumption with an emphasis on building lean muscle, with indications on how many calories and what recipes to stick to.
Conversely, the Optimal Fat Loss Meal Plans is focused on a low-calorie intake, or rather a calorie deficit, but with clear indications as to what nutrients consume so as to get rid of fat gradually and naturally without loss of lean muscle.
The book tells you exactly the specifics, calories, and foods, including fats. You need fats too when burning your own fat storage.
There is also a Quick Start Diet to get you started faster without going through the main course. It is a broken-down version of the main manual with all information necessary for a good start.
Another chapter is dedicated specifically to muscle building. It is called The Ultimate Muscle Meal Guide with information on the right parts of macronutrients you must put into your meals for optimal muscle growth, relative to your body type, of course.
There is also a chapter on supplements. We have a kind of aversion to supplements as we believe you can get excellent results without anyway. However, Dave Ruel makes a clear distinction between which ones are worth your money and which ones are a waste of it.
Finally, there is a Nutritional And Training Log to help you keep on track.
About The Author
Anabolic Cooking is the creation of Dave Ruel, a fitness expert and 230 lb ripped competitor that put together 10 years of expertise and 4 years in the making of this fat-burning and bodybuilding cookbook packed with over 200 delicious recipes designed to make bodybuilders’ and fitness enthusiasts nutrition life easier.
The reason why he decided to put together this book was because of the typical, tasteless bodybuilding diet, a diet based on boiled chicken breasts, broccoli, and plain carbohydrates.
It is easy to empathize with him, whoever has experience in muscle-building diets knows how boring these can be and how difficult it is to come up with dishes that are both nutritious and tasty. The risk is straying off course and revert to unhealthy or fattening foods, maybe nutritious but also over caloric.
Anabolic Cooking PDF And Contents
The main cookbook:
More than 200 so-called “anabolic” recipes, tasty, nutritious, and balanced that, according to the author, even a child can make.
Meal plans: recipes are good, but not good enough. You also need to know what and when to eat and how to go about with your shopping list and grocery errands.
A nutrition chapter dedicated to the basics of nutrition that tells you exactly what’s in the food you eat.
A technical chapter dedicated to the cooking glossary, cutting, and cooking techniques, and how to read a recipe.
A time-saving chapter on how to prepare all your meals for a week in 3 hours only.
Post-workout nutrition chapter to optimize your window of opportunity.
Grocery shopping money-saving tips chapter.
How to set up your kitchen in the most efficient way with all the tools you need.
The bonuses:
A quick start guide to safe time and jump in straight into the meal planning.
Unlimited updates for life.
So far Anabolic Cooking has been tried and tested by satisfied athletes and models with remarkable before and after picture testimonials to show for. They all seem to be pleased with the time saved for preparing meals, their nutritional quality, and their taste.
Anabolic Cooking benefits bodybuilders and generally busy people with a hectic lifestyle by providing an easy, simple, and very effective blueprint to short preparation and cooking times and a vast array of muscle-building recipes.
The resulting dishes are tasty and a long way from the common, boring muscle-building diets of old, while the macro-nutrients are well balanced for every body type for optimal results in muscle gaining and fat loss.
My name is Deborah Foster and I am a Weight Loss Coach with a background in Nutrition Coaching and Personal Training. I specialize in helping women and men break through the yo-yo diet cycle and lose weight for good, without being miserable in the process.
