Bodybuilding routines must include eating to build muscle as a component of an overall bodybuilding program.

Working with weights in the gym forces your muscles to work, but guess what? Working your muscles expends energy, and energy is replenished by your food. Correct nutrition also helps heal muscle injury that often occurs while you are working out. You may not even know you have caused injury to your muscles, but your body knows, and your body needs fuel from food that helps build muscle in order to repair that muscle.

Most people, when thinking of the types of food that helps build muscle, immediately think of eating a low fat diet. For sure that is correct, but probably the most important type of foods that build muscle are foods containing high levels of protein. Foods like meat, fish, chicken, eggs, cheese and other milk products.

Calculating how much protein you should be eating can be tricky. Ask at your gym as to your daily protein requirement. It depends on your weight, and on your lean mass weight (basically the weight of all your bones and organs, minus all body fat).

Foods that build muscle include carbohydrates. So long as the carbohydrates you ingest include plenty of fibre, carbs will contribute to building muscle mass ? not body fat. Great carbohydrate based foods include rice, oatmeal, bananas and other types of fruit such as apples and pears.

Reducing fat in your diet is also important when considering what foods build muscle mass. I said earlier that protein is essential for the best muscle building nutrition. The problem is that many protein sources are also high in fat. The key, therefore, is to eating plenty of proteins that are low in fat. So cut all the fat off your meat, and the skin off your chicken, and drink low fat milk instead of the full fat variety.

You may argue that drinking has no effect on what to eat to build muscle. Hydration is critical to general health and wellbeing. All the more so when you are working to build muscle mass!

Knowing what to eat to build muscle is great, but if you do not combine this great new diet by building muscle mass with weight lifting exercises or other bodybuilding routines, you will not be able to build muscle fast. So you really must do both - eat foods that build muscle, and undertake bodybuilding workouts, and you will end up with a body you will be proud of.