As a competitive bodybuilder, Mark Taylor spent decades training hard and eating a strict low-carb diet, only to miss out on the top prizes in his native Scotland.
That was until she made a drastic change: Taylor started eating carbs, and lots of them, mostly in the form of potatoes.
Suddenly, Taylor, who was 42 at the time, was finally able to grow the muscle he had always wanted and began winning the competitions he had always dreamed of.
In 2023, Taylor won Mr. Universe Masters Over 45, one of the biggest bodybuilding competitions in the world. For the last 10 years, it has been crowned Mr. England, Mr. United Kingdom Mr. Great Britain and Mr. world
While Taylor’s dedication to training and nutrition can’t be discredited, much of his success later in life comes down to potatoes.
This might surprise those who have been led to believe that carbs are the enemy of fat loss. The anti-carb movement has existed in various forms for decades. The low-carb Atkins diet was popular in the late 20th century, the low-fat, low-carb keto diet gained traction in the 2000s, and now there’s a surge in fear around sugar “spikes” in the blood caused, among other things, eating carbohydrates.
However, as Taylor found, carbohydrates are an important part of our diets, are not inherently fattening, and play a key role in building muscle.
Mark Taylor (centre) competing in Mr Universe. Mark Taylor
Carbohydrates help replenish energy reserves in our muscles
There is no denying that protein is important for muscle growth. Protein contains amino acids, which are the building blocks of muscle. But carbs are important too.
Carbohydrates provide the body with energy that is stored in the muscles as glycogen. When we exercise, we deplete these glycogen stores, so eating carbs after exercise replenishes them.
When you have more energy, you can also train harder, indirectly helping you build more muscle.
In addition to eating well (in the right amount), to build muscle you need to train hard with progressive overload and make sure you are getting enough rest as well.
By focusing on carbohydrates that release energy slowly (in Taylor’s case, sweet potatoes and oats), she was able to maintain relatively stable energy levels throughout the day. Eating white potatoes, which release energy faster, after exercise, however, helps replenish glycogen stores more quickly.
Taylor started bodybuilding at a young age
As a teenager, Taylor had a job lifting beverage crates in and out of trucks, and as a result he started to grow some muscle.
When he saw the cover of a men’s fitness magazine in a store at the same time, he thought, “I wouldn’t mind trying to be like that.” So, at the age of 19, he started going to the gym.
The owner of the gym, a bodybuilder, spotted Taylor’s potential and invited the young man to train with him. A year later, Taylor participated in his first bodybuilding competition and finished second in the “first time” category. The following year, he won the overall Scottish championship.
This was the start of Taylor’s decades-long bodybuilding career.
“I won a few Scottish titles but I was never good enough, and by the time I went to the British final I was blowing my mind,” said Taylor, now 52. “I always felt like I had the potential to come in and win all the things, but I just didn’t know how to get there.”
At that time, the idea of being Mr. Universe seemed too unrealistic to even be a goal.
Taylor changed her diet 10 years ago
Taylor ate a strictly high-protein, low-carb diet when preparing for competitions because that’s what she saw other bodybuilders do.
On an average day, Taylor might have eaten some oatmeal for breakfast and a small portion of rice later in the day, but she said her diet focused mostly on chicken and broccoli. This despite his intense training regime.
“I wasn’t getting carbohydrates for energy, so I was constantly not feeling very well, feeling bad and my training wasn’t very good,” Taylor said.
That was until, in 2014, a nutritionist and trainer named Vicky McCann who had seen Taylor compete offered to help him with his nutrition and asked him to send her his food diary.
“She just looked at it and took off,” Taylor said.
McCann gave him a new diet plan that consisted of 10 meals a day, with carbohydrates in each.
“That’s when I transformed my physique,” he said.
Taylor’s muscle mass grew like never before. Within a year, he finished second in Great Britain in a bodybuilding competition, before moving up to the over-45 divisions and winning his string of titles.
Taylor eats six servings of potato a day
On McCann’s meal plan, Taylor went from eating 2,000 calories a day to about 4,000, which increased to 6,000 over the next few years.
It took a couple of weeks to get used to eating double the amount of food, and at first she worried that eating so much more, especially carbs, might jeopardize the physique she wanted. But within a couple of weeks, Taylor could see it was having the opposite effect.
His daily diet is now:
- 150 grams of oats
- 6 meals of 300 grams of sweet potato with 100 grams of chicken
- 1 carb recovery drink
- 350 grams of white potato with 120 grams of chicken and broccoli
- 5 egg whites scrambled with 1 whole egg
Taylor doesn’t count calories or macros, but he and Vicky tweak their diet based on how they look.
Eating more carbs helped Taylor have more energy for her five weekly workouts and made her muscles feel more “full,” she said.
Incredibly, 10 years later, Taylor doesn’t get bored of potatoes, she said. And the results are worth it.
“When I keep all the carbs high, I have a much bigger, more ripped physique,” he said. “If I cut them, I have a smaller, flat-looking physique and it doesn’t actually look as tough.”
He added: “It’s ridiculous how much food you can store and get ripped off.”
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