Meal building

To make this simple let’s divide meals into 2 basic categories: Main meals and snacks. We could call the main meals primary meals, big meals, or anything else. Snacks, on the other hand, could be called small meals, in-between meals, etc. Generally, main meals require cooking, more time to eat, and they are bigger. Snacks often require little to no cooking, take less time to eat, and they are smaller. Remember that what I am calling snacks here as more to do with the size of the meal and the preparation required, not necessarily snack-like food.

For simplicity, it will use a 4-meal structure with 2 meals of each - which is quite common:

• Breakfast (first “snack” meal)

• Lunch (first main meal)

• Afternoon snack (second snack)

• Dinner (second and last main meal)

In a typical schedule, let’s say waking up at 7 AM and sleeping at 11 PM, breakfast could be at 8 AM, lunch at 1 PM, afternoon snack at 5 PM, and dinner at 9 PM. As a general rule, you want the meals reasonably spaced out, in this case, a gap of 5h, 4h and 4h respectively. Again, remember this is only a template to illustrate a basic day of eating and cooking.

Snacks

Training aside, it doesn’t matter when you eat the snack, a morning or afternoon snack are interchangeable. You need a protein source. Protein sources are easier with main meals, as you usually have meat, fish, or eggs. The most popular options for snack meals are yogurt, cheese, milk, protein shakes, and protein bars. With some of them, remember that you may get a lot of calories in order to get the amount of protein needed, and thus low-fat or low-calorie options are preferred. If you need to hit 30g of protein with plain yogurt, that would require 500 calories, but only 176 calories if you have skyr yogurt instead.

After you have hit protein with one of those sources, you may need a carbohydrate or fat source. For carbohydrates, snack-friendly options can be bread, oats, fruit or berries. For fat sources, you can have nuts, seeds, or nut butter. If you need the 3 macronutrients, a pretty standard meal combo that I often stick to is yogurt, nuts and fruit. For example, you may eat 200g of skyr yogurt, 1 banana, 1 apple, and 25g of walnuts. That would total around 400 calories for the whole meal, with 26g of protein, 62 of carbs and 11g of fat.

Main meals

For this it gets more difficult to provide a template because you have a near unlimited amount of options. But it’s a good idea to again start with protein. You can have meat, fish, sea food, meat substitutes or legumes.

Afterwards, you want to focus on veggies to keep you full. Use whatever you like the most. It can be broccoli, cabbage, mushrooms, etc. After you have both protein and veggies, that’s a pretty solid meal already and you have most of what you need. However, you may lack enough carbs or fats. For carbs, you can add pasta, rice, legumes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, yams, etc. For fat, you generally don’t have to worry about fat intake too much during meal meals, as they’re easily filled in with snacks from nuts or nut butters. But if you want something else, adding avocado or healthy oils (such as olive oil) is a great solution.

So here is an example of how a day could look like with a similar structure to what I have been describing:

Breakfast: Yogurt, Banana and Almonds

Lunch: Salmon, Rice, Broccoli, and EVOO

Snack: Protein bar, Apple, and Walnuts

Dinner: Chicken breast, tomatoes, zucchini

Here is yet another example:

Breakfast: Whey protein shake and Peach

Lunch: Steak, Sweet Potatoes, Spinach, EVOO

Snack: Whole-grain sandwich with low-fat cheese

Dinner: Eggs, Peppers, Squash

Please remember that this is a very rough template. There are more food options than this, you don’t have to have hit specific macros in any meal, and you certainly don’t need to follow this main meal / snack template. It’s just a sketch to try to give you some guidance on how it can be set up.