I’m curious how you’ve been about food historically, nutrition vs enjoyment. Ramped up (down?) to the repetition, cold turkey, other? I would get bored of eating the same thing for lunch every day.
Historically I'm great with eating the same shit every day. I ate cereal every day for breakfast until I was like 35. I ate a sandwich for lunch every day until I was like 40.
Realistically, with weight loss or mass building, consistency is going to be key. Therefore you want as much consistency as you can for as many meals as you can so you can have a variety of stuff for the remainder. So this happened to work out really well for me, since I'm already super consistent. I just needed to adjust my consistency to be within my goals.
So, lets take a sample day (which is most days)
Breakfast
- 6oz Cantaloupe (potassium - I fuckin hate bananas, and they're too high calories)
- Dannon Greek yogurt, pick a flavor.
Total 138 calories, 13protein, 22 carbs
Lunch
-6 oz grilled chicken (find a marinade or a spice mix you like, shit doesn't need to be plain, it adds negligible calories, it's not like sauces)
-2.5 oz blueberries.
292 calories, 51 protein, 10 carbs
Post workout shake
2 scoops of gold standard protein powder (pick a flavor, doesn't matter)
2 cups of skim milk
407 calories, 65 protein, 30 carbs.
That's 3 "meals" out of the day, and is a grand total of 836 calories, 129g protein, 9g fat 62 carbs.
Now lets say you wanna stay under 2000 calories to lose weight. You've got 1200 calories to play with there. Do whatever you want for dinners or snacks or other bullshit and just stay under 1200 calories. Tracking like this was the key for me to unlock total control of my body. For example, I don't have any vices. Cherry Pepsi is the only thing I decided was non negotiable. That's fine, have a can or a bottle, it's 180 calories. Who gives a shit, I've still got 1000 to play with. My girlfriend makes homemade Crunch Wraps. I did the math one day on it, all of the ingredients are 700 calories. I can literally eat everything I said above, have a motherfucking homemade crunch wrap for dinner and wash it down with a Cherry Pepsi and I'm still under my maintainance for the day. The more that you can make consistent, the easier this is. So, my baseline every single day is 836 calories and I know I want a Cherry Pepsi for dinner. I can literally work backwards and figure out what my last meal has to be calorie-wise, and it can literally be anything. Spaghetti, tacos, fish, pork loin, whatever. It doesn't even matter what it is, I'm literally just mathing out one meal a day because I've made the rest of it consistent.
I get it, eating healthy can be boring, but I look at it like this - I gotta eat these 3 "meals" every day, The last meal can be anything I want, or nothing at all. Some days I skip dinner and get a large strawberry Blizzard. Or eat a row of Pumpkin Bars. Doesn't matter, because as long as I can keep track of that one meal's calories, I'm gonna stay on track.
Worth it.
