Fresh Out of The Box – How Meal Subscriptions Can Help You Smash Your Fitness Goals

If you ask any body builder what the most challenging part of training and gaining body mass is, you may be surprised by the answer they give you. Yes, all of those squats, deadlifts and bench presses are certainly tough, but the real challenge of body building is dietary management. Yes, the challenge of how to take consume enough protein as a bodybuilder, is one that most aspiring builders sadly fail at.

If you are building yourself then you know the struggle all too well. A bodybuilder’s diet is a full time obsession. It takes a lot of time to plan your weekly diet and then even more time is lost having to pop to the supermarket 3 or 4 times a week to restock on fresh produce. In fact, it’s a wonder you ever even find the time to actually hit the damned gym! Furthermore whilst the ‘chicken for breakfast, lunch and dinner’ diet is fine for a week or two, after a while even the sight of a chicken breast will make you want to vomit.

Fortunately, help is at hand. The growing “meal box” market is now catering specifically for bodybuilders and athletes-in-training by providing a range of high protein boxes that aid recovery and muscle creation. Let’s take a closer look.

What Is a Food Subscription?

When I first heard the phrase “food subscription” it conjured images of war-time food ration books but the reality could not be further from that as it’s actually an abundance of wholesome nutritional goodness!

A food subscription is simply a service whereby you sign up to a company, they plan your meals for the day, week or month and then deliver the fresh ingredients to you in the form of a ‘meal kit’. In some ways, it’s like ordering take-out except that you have to do the actual cooking yourself and crucially, meal boxes tend to focus on providing healthy meals rather than deep-fried-mega-carb-loads.

There are food subscriptions to suit all diets ranging from vegan to mega-carnivore and food boxes catering for singletons or for entire families. Initially, they proved very popular with working families and single professionals struggling to find shopping and cooking time but the space is fast growing and athletes are now in focus.

How A Food Subscription Works

Each food sub works a little differently. You can find some that will send you 3 meals per day and others that will send one. You can find weekly or monthly subs and you can arrange to have “weekends off” where you fend for yourself. Typically, deliveries are made 2 or 3 times per week but this also varies. You can usually cancel at any time subject to a week’s notice (please check before you sign up) so if your circumstances change, you are not locked in for too long. Best of all, you can also provide feedback to your meal-sub provider so they can cater to your taste and needs (ie, “broccoli is the devil’s spawn, please don’t send it again!’).

You can probably see why these appeal to body-builders or athletes in training. When you leave the gym at 7pm, you just want to get home and get your feed ASAP. You really don’t want to lose time wandering around supermarkets trying to work out how much protein is in an Aubergine.

But how does the food taste? Well, once again, each box is as different as each set of taste buds and there is no single answer here. However, just like takeaway restaurants, meal kits live and die on repeat customers and word of mouth testimony so market forces dictate a high bar for quality. Basically if you follow the prep instructions correctly, you should find the food to be pretty delicious – and if it isn’t, just add more soy sauce!

Meal Kit Delivery for Bodybuilders

If you are a serious bodybuilder, are looking to rapidly gain a lot of mass, or are simply a very muscular person, then there are a few special options open to you. You can either simply order a two person subscription, eat all the food yourself to double up on the calories. Or alternatively, you can go for meat kits which are food boxes consisting only of animal based foods and primarily full of meat. A meat kit is specifically designed for high protein diets and crucially, they contain a different variety of fresh meats so you don’t have to worry about endlessly forcing chicken down your throat.

Obviously, the costs will be higher than with a standard food box but a bodybuilders grocery bill is higher than the average persons’ anyway.

You can also get food boxes for Keto diets which are apparently very popular with MMA fighters looking to lean down whilst keeping muscular strength. Or, if you are that rarest of beings, a vegetarian or vegan body builder, then you will know full well how especially difficult it is to get a high protein, high carb diet. The good news is that by signing up for a food subscription you can tailor it and let them take care of the unique challenges you face.

Unless you are one of those strange creatures who loves wandering around supermarkets, then a meal box subscription could really help you save time and energy that could be better spent in the gym. Why not give it a go?