Eating and Cycling for the Poor

So you might be in the same kind of position I’m in, just a year or two out of college trying to make it in the real world. Now we have a mortgage payment, not rent. And what comes with owning a home vs renting?  Paying for your own maintenance. When I rented and had a problem I would call my landlord and they would send over the maintenance crew and fix the problem, no cost to me unless it was something stupid we did when we were drunk haha. Now when something goes it’s up to me to pay for it. Just recently we had a problem with squirrels in our attic. First company I called came out and quoted me a five fucking thousand dollars. I said no way ill live with them. Next company said $750. So I said ok, whatever. It sucks but it needs to be done. This is just one of the many unexpected expenses that comes up when you own your own home. Then there’s insurance, for the house and your car, utilities, car payment, and all the other bullshit. When your fresh out of school and not making great money yet it’s hard to make ends meet sometimes. In school room and board were paid for, the only thing I had to pay for was for stuff I wanted to do in my free time. No car payment, insurance, , mortgages etc. very minimal surprise expenses. I wasn’t big on going out to the bars or anything like that so all my extra money went to food and gear. And I had a meal plan and the cafe was all you can eat 3 times a day so I didn’t have to spend much on food from the grocery store each week, maybe 50 bucks tops cause I would buy in huge huge bulk so it was very cheap, I needed to be able to make maybe 2 snack/meals each day at home. The cafeteria had plenty of eggs, oats, chicken, milk, potatoes, rice, beef, fruit, and all kinds of other stuff. I’d bring my back pack and some tupperware and load up some more chicken, rice and whatever else I could fit in there for later. All I really ever bought from the grocery store was maybe 4lbs of steak at 4.50 a pound, the cheapest leanest cut I could find (top sirloin), a few pounds of lean ground beef so every night my post workout meal could be either a huge 16oz steak and a big ass baked potato, or a pound of ground beef usually wrapped up in whole wheat tortillas, and id also buy some tilapia to have in between the meals I ate on campus and some oats and a few other things. So I had a decent job while I was in school making a few hundred bucks a week. Enough to buy more gear then I could ever run. Or maybe your’e not out of college yet and you’re a typical broke college kid and moneys tight, well you’re most likely not only enough to be cycling so forget about the steroid portion of the article, or file it away for future use and and focus on the cheap meal plan part. But if you were like me and stayed in school until you were 25 then go ahead and soak up the info on cheap cycling. But if you haven’t started yet my advice would be stay natural. Its honestly the best way to go. You can build an absolutely phenomenal physique naturally with a good diet, training program and some patience. But if you’ve already decided, 23-25 is the absolute earliest you should start using gear. 25 really is best, you’ll do much better if you spend 5-10 years training natty before using gear. Or maybe neither of those apply to you and youre just in a time in life where money is tight (sending kids to college, between jobs etc) Anyways lets talk about how you can continue to eat a diet rich in protein and quality calories and keep cycling for very little money.  

So now that moneys tight and  we really can’t afford to be spending much extra money at all, so how do we afford the diet and gear?  Well I’ll talk about the diet first, as that’s the most important part. You can run all the gear in the world but without a solid diet you’re not going to get anywhere. So for about 75 bucks a week if you’re smart and buy in bulk at stores like Sam’s Club or B’J’s and Walmart you can buy the food you need to put together a solid diet. It might not have a lot of variety, it might be a little bland but it will provide you will the necessary calories, protein fats and carbs needed to either grow, or lean out. As a bodybuilder/gym rat at a certain point you stop looking at food for taste and only for its calorie and macro nutrient content, it’s a means to an end, so you should be pretty used to eating stuff you don’t necessarily like to eat all the time. First Walmart sells a big box of 5 dozen eggs for about 6 bucks. That’s enough eggs for the week, then 2 cartons of liquid egg whites, it’s a little less than ten bucks for two of those, each has either 5 cups of egg whites, each cup is a little over 20g of protein. So you scramble up 6 whole eggs, add a cup of egg whites. BJ’s sells a huge 20lb bucket of oats, 180 servings for 30 bucks. each serving is 200 calories, 34g of carbs 4g fat and 7g protein, 2 servings with your breakfast and you got yourself 70 of quality complex carbs, all together this breakfast is about 1000 cals, 80g of carbs, 80g protein and 40g of fat. Fat content is a little high so it might be beneficial to go with more egg whites and less whole eggs but the egg yolk has a lot of health benefits and protein, and as long as the rest of your meals are pretty lean which they will be it will even out. So the total cost of having 2 servings of oatmeal 7 days per week is $2.33, 33 cents a day. You get 90 days out of this bucket. I mostly focus on following my diet Monday Saturday, Sundays kind of an anything goes day, treat myself, pig out etc. So were using 36 eggs for breakfast Monday Saturday leaving us with 24 extra eggs, I like to have these right before bed. ill scramble up 4 whole eggs, and the two cartons of egg whites we buy has 10 cups and we only need 6 for our breakfasts, so ill add a little less than a cup of egg whites in there for more protein. The eggs have a higher fat content so they will digest slower which is a great thing right before bed giving your muscles a constant stream of amino acids all night long to use to build and repair your muscles. This gives you another 450 calories, and 40g of quality protein. A lot of times ill buy 2 big things of greek yogurt and each has about four one cup servings with about 20g of protein so I’ll have a cup of this with my eggs before bed to bring the protein total up to 60g and add in some slow digesting casein protein to my meal. So for the week the cost of having both of these meals 6 days a week is about 18 bucks, 25 if you add the greek yogurt like I usually do. so about 2 bucks a meal.

So now that we have our breakfast covered and last meal of the day let’s talk about all the meals in between this. Always buy in bulk. For $22 at Walmart I buy a 26lb bucket of brown rice. its 262 servings. 34g of carbs per serving. I typically eat two servings at a time so for me it’s really 131 meals, which is still a ton for only 22 dollars. It’s like 16 cents a meal. I’ll have this 3 times per day with either 12oz of chicken or 12oz tilapia. So my rice costs me $3.06 per week. I usually buy a 4lb bag of tilapia for 10 bucks, you can do much better than this, but this is just what I do. I usually get 20 prepackaged filets in a bag, so ill have this once a day with 2 servings of the brown rice. It comes out to 650 calories, almost 70g of protein, 70g carbs and 9.5g of fat. It’s so easy to make also. I put the frozen filets in the microwave for about a minute to thaw a bit then I fry them on the stove in about 5 minutes. Then great value sells a 5lb bag of boneless skinless chicken breast, for 10 bucks, again you can do way better than this but this works for my budget. I usually eat a pound per day so this last Monday-Friday. I usually stop over in the fresh section and pickup another pound or two so I have enough for the entire week. So all together it comes out to about 12 bucks. 8oz of chicken with 2 servings of brown rice is 540 cals, 52g of protein, 70g carbs and 2g of fat. With these meals I add a handful of almonds for the good fats which brings the total calories of the meals up to 625 and an extra 8g of good fats. so 10g fat, 52g pro 70g carbs, and we have two of these meals per day. I like to make these meals two and three, then meal four is my pre workout meal with the tilapia which I feel is a little bit lighter and doesn’t bog me down and make me feel sluggish when I’m training. I try and eat this about 2 hours before training, then right before I lift I have an apple and some coffee, it’s the best preworkou in my opinion. The almonds for the week cost about 3 bucks. Then post workout, I buy two gallons of chocolate milk, it’s delicious and cheap, it has fast acting carbs you want post workout and a good amount of protein, and again its delicious. I’m sick of protein powder, and it’s a waste of money. My gains are no different with or without it. And it’s always better to get your calories and protein from real food. This is about a 7 dollar expense per week. And lastly, my post workout meal. Depending on your macro nutrient requirements you can either have fish or chicken again, this will keep the total fat for the day around 120g. But my preference and I have been doing the same thing for years is a lean steak. A 10oz top sirloin will add about another 20g of fat, but also 60g of high quality protein. Sometimes ill eat a pound or more of steak for my post workout meal, something about a diet rich in beef just works well for building muscle. But this is usually when my carbs are lower this really jacks up your fat macros, and you really cant have both high carbs and fats, you gotta pick one. But for to eat a 10oz steak 6 days a week it’s a little under 4lbs of steak per week. so I pick it up for about $4.50 a pound so it costs me around $17 a week. Add an 8oz baked potato and it’s a meal. A 10lb bag of potatoes costs me about five or six bucks and usually has about 20 8oz potatoes. So the bag lasts about 3 weeks. So $2 a week for the potatoes. And the one thing everyone forgets, vegetables. I usually buy some fresh broccoli and asparagus for about five bucks for the week. And there you have it. Roughly 4600 calories, most likely more than most people need so this could get even cheaper. 375g of protein entirely from quality whole food sources, not supplements. 420g of carbs, and 150g of fat. The fat content is a bit high. All of our bodies are different and by know you should know what types of diet your respond best to so you can tweak this to make it fit your needs. If you go with more egg whites and drop the steak in favor of fish or chicken, you can drop the fats down to about 100g which would be my optimal macro ratio. So now what’s the weekly grand total?  84 dollars. This is extremely cheap considering its the highest quality sources of protein fats and carbs. steak, chicken, fish, eggs and greek yogurt for your protein sources, brown rice, oats and potatoes for your carbs and nuts and the fat from fish for quality sources of fats. Really can’t beat it. It’s really not all that bland either the only meal you eat twice is the chicken, and I think most of us are pretty used to eating chicken breast.  But many people don’t need 4600 calories a day, a lot would do fine on 3500-4000, so this 84 dollars per week could be cut down by almost a quarter to somewhere in the 60s. But then there are the monsters who need 6000 calories a day, so they’re bills either gonna have to be higher, or they’re gonna have to really bargin shop.

Now what about gear? It’s going to be hard to afford test plus EQ or deca or tren etc. So what do you do? We definitely want to keep cycling and keep the gains coming but there’s no way we can afford to be dropping 500 bucks on a cycle. So what’s a meathead to do? Well a lot of sources put on promotions, or have product of the week sales where stuff is 50% off etc. So you wait for one of these deals to come around and buy a 10 pack of test e or c for 240 bucks. We all have different doses we like to run, but for the average guy this will give you about 3 cycles at 700mgs ew for 12-14 weeks. Or about 4 12 week cycles at 500mgs ew. With quality gear 500mgs is plenty. Grab a tub of 1000 5mg dbol for 85 bucks and you got 6 week kickers for all of those cycles and beyond. Then most of us need to have some adex on hand. I’m not very prone to estrogenic side effects but I can usually pick up 100 .25mg adex for 70 bucks, or 28 pharm grade 1mg on promo for around 50 bucks and just break them in half. ill usually take .25mgs MWF or .5mgs twice a week, sometimes less so that 100 will last me all three of those cycles. And nolva and clomid are dirt cheap even for pharm grade stuff. Pct can be put together for about 20-30 bucks. So there you go, a 12-14 week 750mg ew test e dbol cycle with adex  and nolva and clomid for about 150 bucks. And I’m not talking about using subpar gear, I’m buying the same brands I’ve been buying and always will buy. No research chemicals or bathtub brew gear for me. You just have to be smart, buy in bulk and on promo.

Now people are going to bitch and say you can’t look good on just test you need tren and mast etc. when cutting to pull off the dense lean dry look and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I could show you some pictures of friends in stage condition, big, dry, full and lean on just 500mgs of sust. No ais, no orals nothing. They didn’t even know to cut the test a few weeks out to drop the water back then. So by knowing your body, eating a solid diet and training hard as hell you can produce a very lean and dry physique on just test. Back then they didn’t really have much at their disposal but we do. But were poor so anavars out of the question. But winstrol is dirt cheap, is just as effective as var at giving that hard dry vascular look and might be even better for drying you out. It definitely dries your joints out, that’s one of the negatives. But when your cutting the goal is really just to preserve all the muscle you have. So 700mgs of test per week is over kill, anywhere from 250-400mgs ew is plenty when dieting. That for 12 weeks with say 50mgs of winstrol the last 4-6 weeks with a great diet, some cardio and hard training will have you looking great.  And those 10 vials will last a lot longer at when running just 250-400mgs per week. Those doses really are effective for building muscle. Obviously the gains on 250mgs of test are going to be slower than on 600mgs of test but none the less you’re going to make gains much faster than if you were training natural. 250mgs of test put some peoples test levels around 2000ng/dl, naturally depending on age most of us fall somewhere between 350-700. So that 250mgs of test is going make a pretty dramatic difference. 

And I don’t need to explain how to afford a gym membership. Hell train at planet fitness if you have to for 10 bucks a month. If you’re reading this there’s about a 99% chance you have a gym membership. But there you have it, the cheapest yet highly effective diets and cycles for us poor people. Or, do what I did, when times were good I stocked up, so now I have some deca, eq, tren, various orals etc for my cycles for the next few years. So now I just have to afford my food bill, the most expensive part of our lifestyle.