How to Structure a Day of Eating

‘To Tetris your day’ - the action of eating without structure or a plan and logging in the food as you go only to find that at the end of the day you have only 184 calories left to eat and you need to hit 87g of protein.

One of the biggest mistakes many people do is tracking as they go and ending up with absurd numbers to try to fit their meals around and most likely won’t be able to successfully check off their nutrition non-negotiables without either:

• Undershooting protein by a lot

• Overshooting calories by at least 300 cals to hit the protein target

This usually happens for 2 main reasons:

• Prioritising foods of low nutritious value over foods with high nutritious value

• Lack of a plan and not knowing how to structure the day of eating while also enjoying fun foods

Whether you’re tracking calories or not you still need to have some framework around your nutrition and a level of tracking things.

Most of our main meals are going to have the following foundation:

Protein + Carb + Fat + Veggies

You want to choose a protein source (refer to the appendix on the previous section for ideas) alongside a carb. Your fats could be the tablespoon of olive oil you use to cook the meal or could be hummus dip served with the meal.

Let’s say hypothetically you’re prescribed the following macros: 1700 cals, 130g protein, 160g carbs, 60g fats, 30g fibre

You want to start off by dividing each number by the number of meals you plan to have a day.

In this example, let’s say you decide to have 4 meals a day - Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Snack - you would look at having, for each meal,  approximately:

425 cals, 33g protein, 40g carbs, 15g fats, 7g fibre / meal

It’s important to note that these numbers are meant to be a guideline and not a reason to obsess over making  each meal fit each number to a T.

I would suggest starting by focusing primarily on calories and protein numbers for each meal.

If you’re getting your 5 servings of veggies and 2 servings of fruits, you’ll find by the end of the day that you’ll have hit your fiber targets without having to try too hard!

When it comes to logging in meals in a calorie tracking app like MFP, take it one meal at a time and tweak ingredients according to your prescribed calories and macros at the time.

It’s worth noting that what your chicken pasta salad recipe might look like in a fat loss phase won’t look the same as the same recipe in a maintenance phase. Once we understand the fundamentals of diet and the main sources of each food, tweaking meals for each phase/prescribed macros becomes easier and easier.

In the example of the chicken pasta salad, you’ll find that the recipe will differ as follows: