No Food, No Muscle

Just how important is eating to the process of building muscle? Ask Daryl Gee, the guy who came out of nowhere to win the middleweight class at the ’09 NPC USA Championships, earned his pro card there and put it to use just a week later, taking second at the Jacksonville Pro 202-and-Under show.

Just looking at “G-Force,” as he’s called, you can clearly see that his genetics are better than the average man’s. Yet even he failed to make any meaningful gains in his earliest years of lifting weights.

“I trained every night for two years, but I had no idea you were supposed to eat anything after your workout,” Daryl reveals. “Basically, I was breaking down my muscles and then leaving them with nothing to repair themselves with—pure catabolism.”

Even though he was in his late teens and, theoretically, should have been growing like a weed with even a rudimentary understanding of proper training, two years of lifting weights yielded a measly three-pound gain—something other teenagers have seen in their first couple of weeks of training.

“Once I learned about nutrition and how vital it is, everything changed for me,” explains Gee, who now packs a dense 175 pounds on his contest-ready 5’4” frame. “But I learned the hard way that if you don’t eat and provide your body with the raw materials to grow, your workouts are a total waste of time and effort.”