Introduction

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At this point you may be asking yourself, so what should I eat? What should an average day look like? Armed with the knowledge from the first 2 lessons, we can design a meal plan that falls within those parameters.

If the goal intake for a person is 150g protein, each meal should contain 30g protein, ~7g carbohydrates, and 20-30g fat. To reach 150g protein, protein snacks/shakes/supplements will be necessary in addition to 3 main meals.

Going to the grocery store is a huge part of this program. You will need to make sure that you are stocking your fridge and pantry with all the right things to make sure you have all you need to stick to the plan. That also means that you will NOT be buying anything that is not on the program! If you do not buy chips, bread, sugary snack, and other things that do not fall within diet parameters, you will not be able to easily to the pantry and grab them, which means you won’t be able to cheat as easily! This diet will change how you shop, and ideally, change your relationship with food. We must always remember: Food is Fuel. Food is not for comfort, stress relief, or fun. We eat to live, survive, and thrive. After we have attained success in this program, we can reintroduce cheat days and meals, and have a more flexible diet, but for now, we are on a mission, and we need to stick to the plan! By only buying healthy foods, you set yourself up for success!

This is where meal preparation comes in. Taking a day, or a couple of days in a week to prepare multiple servings of protein at a time to be kept in the fridge is a great strategy to employ. This will allow you to have something ready at all times to eat and minimize the amount of time cooking.

Protein supplements are a great option as well, such as Whey, and Whey Isolate protein shakes. The key with these supplements is to make sure you read the label to ensure that they are “Cold processed” and “microfiltered”. Hydrolyzed protein supplements are broken down with acid or heat, and may actually denature (essentially overcook the protein) and make it a much less usable protein than you would think. There are also some products known as fermented amino acid protein supplements, which are very usable by the body. We will cover some recommended supplements at the end of this lesson, as not all supplements are created equal.

Additionally, we need to intake a small snack of protein and fat the hour before we go to sleep. This snack should be about 15 grams of protein, some MCT/Coconut oil, and Omega 3. This combination will feed your muscles overnight, and the fat will help your body switch into fat-burning mode overnight. This is critical because when we are sleeping is actually when we burn the most fat! We should also increase our sleep amount during this program, to leverage this fact to our advantage. Getting an additional hour of sleep adds up when we are trying to lose fat mass, in addition to the numerous health benefits of getting enough sleep.

So to summarize, we need 3 main meals that consist of high protein, high fat, and low carbohydrate, a couple of snacks of protein and fat, and a nighttime snack of protein and fat. You should go as long as you can in between meals/eating, and remember to log everything so we can see exactly what macronutrients you’re getting and fine-tune things as we go.