The Ultimate Guide To Bulking On A Budget!

You've obviously put a fair amount of effort into this, so props for that. Stopped reading after "High protein, low calories." That's how you cut, not bulk. Bulking is high protein, high carb, high calories. Ideally 500 above maintenance (roughly correlates to 1lb/0.45kg of weight increase per week).

Ah I wasn't clear enough. What I meant was to achieve this without going way over your caloric limit you want the foods to have a preferentially high amount of protein for each food.

Thanks for pointing that out!

Haha, fair enough. Also, Tuna >>> Although admittedly it is expensive, like you said.

Also, whats wrong with a good old fashioned protein shake? 25g per 105(ish) calories.

Oats...rice....pasta....bread....Peanut Butter

Again, thanks, I meant protein shake when I said whey protein haha

What about them?

Cheesy pasta with chicken, and veg, with some bread is the ultimate bulking meal. Can easily get like 1200cal per meal

Amateur.....

1 litre of Olive oil - 9999999999 calories.

Sounds like something I'll see on Facebook one day; "Fitness companies hate him.. Get jacked with this one simple tip" - drink olive oil by the litre

Full-fat Milk 2 pints of the stuff is a good high calorie meal.

Good effort mate, this is pretty good Certainly some room for improvement though. If we're adding Impact whey protein into the mix, we should at least make it fair since this is a budget bulking thread and use the cheapest/most cost-effective option, which would be the Unflavoured 5kg bag. Stats:

Impact Whey Protein shake (with water)
Price per serving - £0.23
Calories - 103
Protein - 21g
Cost per 50g protein - £0.54
Cost per 1000 calories - £2.23

50g of protein from this stuff @54p is substantially cheaper than getting 50g of protein from eggs @69p, or any other source I've ever come across.

I also disagree with the fact that you shouldn't be getting "too much" and that getting most of your protein from other sources is wiser. Whey protein, as I've pointed out numerous times on these forums, is officially considered a first class source of protein with a superb amino acid profile. I get about 2/3 of my protein from whey these days, considering I used to only get about 1/3 of it from whey my results certainly haven't been hindered. I'm not suggesting getting it all from whey, I don't think that much dairy product would be good for you, but considering it's so cheap and the "whole food is better than whey" idea really holds no merit, I think it should be spoken about more positively.

Other than that, this is a brilliant start Hopefully we can help out and get this page tip-top and this can work as a reference point that we can link people to in the future when they ask questions related to this stuff.

Thanks man

I will stand my stance with getting a wider variety of proteins; as there is no harm in variety.

And the protein I used was a typical myprotein chocolate brownie flavour 5kg bag, came out as 0.29p a scoop, so it worked out that eggs were cheaper - I may be wrong with my calculations tho

Yeah fair enough, just felt it necessary to state that if you want to get a large chunk of your protein from whey then you will get results.

Your calculations were probably correct in which case (didn't actually check), but yeah, the unflavoured is MILES cheaper and since this a thread about budgeting, best to pick out the cheapest option in everything I feel I've actually become to prefer the unflavoured stuff as well, since it's almost tasteless it's not something you get sick of the taste of unlike most flavours of protein powder. As a treat I sometimes buy something like a Yazoo or other "thin" milkshake and then add some unflavoured whey to thicken it up, tastes a bit like a McDonald's milkshake