How To: Building Meals Around Your Goals
We're Back Baby!
Welcome back to Col Me Maybe! We’re kicking the New Year off at the end of January as a sort of reminder that New Years is arbitrary. You can start or improve at any time.
We’re back baby! And we’re full of energy and ideas.
This newsletter for example is chock FULL of infographics. It’s all very exciting stuff. I have a lot of ideas to break down and a lot of Liver King being a lying piece of shit jokes to get off. Hey, there was the first one of 2023! Cheers 🥂
A common problem I hear from clients, friends, and strangers on social media is that they just don’t know how to make healthier meals. This causes problems in two ways.
It often leads to feeling stuck & discouraged
This is when people find diets where all the food choices exist in a neat little box and the stupid diet becomes very attractive.
Everyone wants the shortcut, well here it is: Learn to cook.
Being able to make delicious food at home that aligns with your goals might as well be a super power when it comes to health & fitness. I’ll make a longer post & maybe a video series about how to cook another time, for now let’s jump in.
The Framework
In as few words as possible, here is my process:
Start with your calorie & protein goal and reverse engineer it based on your eating patterns.
Say you’re eating 2000 Calories & 100g of protein per day. That’s your goal. Now, how do you like to eat throughout the day? Do you like 3 square meals with a couple snacks? Would you rather have 4-5 smaller meals and not worry about snacking? Do you like eating breakfast in the am or would you rather not?
A brief aside to discuss the research. What does it say?
First of all, it says if you’re not consistent it doesn’t fucking matter. It does not matter what the research says if you’re going to be inconsistent trying to make it happen.
Now,
The current best practice for maximizing your ability to build muscle is to eat 1.6-2.2g of protein per kg of bodyweight spread evenly across 4 meals. That’s .7-1.0g of protein per lb for you uncultured folk. That means .18 to .25 grams of protein per lb of your bw per meal per day.
Keep in mind this is difficult and requires planning. For me that would be 4 meals of about 600 calories and 35-50g of protein. Meals at 7am, 11am, 3pm, & 7pm. Which, to be fair could be meals at 7am, 11am, and 7pm with a protein shake at 3pm. The research says “protein feedings” not meals.
Now, back to the topic at hand.
If you are eating 2500 calories and your protein goal is 120-150g protein AND you like to eat 3 square meals then you’ll break down the numbers you need into 3 equal meals. Which is what I do.
That leaves some snacks leftover if you want them. This is my preferred meal structure because more than 700 sometimes makes me sleepy and 40g of protein is about where someone my size will start having diminishing returns with Muscle Protein Synthesis as we discussed above.
If you want to be a 90s health guru and have 5 smaller meals spread out through the day to “stoke your metabolism” you can do that too! I mean there’s no reason to but to be fair, there’s really no reason not to if it’s what you want to do 🤷♂️
And remember. You can do any and all of these. The routine of doing the same thing every day helps me a lot, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it. You can have a lighter breakfast and back load your calories or have a huge breakfast and graze the rest of the day. If you’re hitting your calories and protein, the rest really doesn’t matter all that much.
Building The Meal
Now that we have your meal structure all laid out, let’s build the meal.
When I’m planning out a meal I think about the 4 things that matter to me:
I need to get 35-50g of protein.
I don’t really want to eat more than 750 calories. (remember I get sleepy)
It needs to have a serve of veggies.
I want it to taste good. I’m not eating boring shit to get fit. No thank you.
This is also the order of importance. Getting that amount of protein is the hardest part so I build the meal around that.
Another quick aside: Protein falls into one of two categories in my mind. Similar to lifting you have your main lifts and your accessories, same goes with protein. Main proteins are things you can build a meal around.
Meat & Fish for example get you most of the way to your goal without much effort. If I eat 4 oz of Chicken that’s 25g, sure, I could just eat 8 oz and be all the way there but woof. That’s a lot of chicken. Throws the balance of the meal all out of wack too.
That’s where accessory proteins come in. Throwing some cheese on top, using greek yogurt instead of sour cream. Have a side of cottage cheese, etc.
Wait, why are eggs on there twice? Cuz they’re both.
If you’re eating an omelet they’re the main. 3 eggs gets you 21g of protein. Add 1oz of cheese & a piece of sourdough and you have 32g.
You can always throw a fried egg onto ramen, stirfry, a burger/sandwich for an extra 7g of protein. Egg whites work in the same way, they’re one of the best sources of protein per calorie you’ll find.
But they’re an accessory dammit! They’re boring AF by themselves and you deserve better. Mix them with real eggs to add volume. Life’s too short to eat egg whites by themselves.
Practical Examples
For an example of how this looks, I made buddha bowls for us Friday night and they were hot fire flame. We only had chicken for protein and I knew I wanted sweet potatoes so I built a meal around it.
*I didn’t follow a recipe for the tahini dressing but this is what I made. I love this blog so I probably learned it from them years ago and just forgot lol.
Boom 40g of protein and it was delicious.
It’s setup this way because you can do anything with Protein, but once you choose the carb you start to narrow options of things that will be good. You can pair chicken, beef, salmon with literally anything. They can all go with rice, can all be turned into a sandwich, be added into a pasta sauce or soup, etc. But once you choose the rice or bun or pasta, the veg options narrow. You could make a chicken and broccoli melt I guess. But it’d probably be better on the side or just with a side salad.
Get vegetables that complement the meat and carbs you’re eating. You’re much more likely to enjoy them that way.
Take spinach for example. More versatile than you think. Nat doesn’t like spinach so I just make sauces out of it. She usually doesn’t even know it’s in there.
Ba-boom! 42g of protein! And it’s so delicious you don’t even know. I was going to make another graphic with the recipe but I don’t really use measurements so I just linked to my boy Kevin’s recipe. The only thing he doesn’t tell you is that the secret to a good pasta sauce is adding pasta water. It’s incredible. You don’t even know.
If you want any of these recipes comment or message me and I’ll send you an email with links and an explanation.
To recap:
Break your day into meals and snacks based on your macros and your preferred way of eating.
Create each meal around the protein you are going to use first. Then decide on the carbohydrate and lastly add the veg, any sauces, and additional protein to get you to your goal.
Experiment and be kind to yourself. Your plan didn’t work and your meal tasted like shit? Google what you wanted to make and find a recipe where they did it right. Learn what you did wrong.
You don’t have to be perfect. Just head in the right direction.
I’m trying to stay off Twitter because I’ve slowly started spending too much time on there as of late anyway. So there won’t be the I laughed section for a while. We’ll see if I bring it back in another capacity. I’ll let you know.
Hope you all have an amazing week/start to your February on Wednesday! See you next time