How I plan food
Four meals a day, one prep session, and a calibration loop. Written down because deciding what to eat every day is a tax I refuse to pay.
Six training days a week — two gym, two Muay Thai, football, one easy run — and a desk job for everything in between. That combination sets the whole problem: high energy demand, high protein demand, and almost no willingness to think about food on a Tuesday evening.
So it is a system, not a diet.
Inputs before targets
Everything downstream depends on four numbers: bodyweight, training volume, activity factor, and which phase I am in. I estimate maintenance from Mifflin-St Jeor times an activity factor around 1.7, and then treat the result as a starting point with ±10% error, not a truth. The real number comes from the calibration loop at the bottom.
Phases are simple: maintenance by default, lean gain by adding carbohydrate, cut by removing carbohydrate and some fat. Protein barely moves.
Macros: one variable, two floors
Protein sits at 1.8–2.0 g/kg — the range where the evidence stops improving for lifters. In a deficit I push toward the top of it, because that is when muscle is at risk. There is a hard floor at 1.6 g/kg that I never cross.
Fat has a floor too, and it is the one people quietly break: 0.8 g/kg minimum for hormonal function. Low-fat is not an option, so fat is a constraint rather than a lever.
That leaves carbohydrate as the only real dial. Up on a build, down on a cut, higher on training days than rest days. One variable to turn means one decision to make.
Fibre target is 38–45 g/day, which is harder than it sounds at high calories. I get it without eating salads: oats, chia and flax at breakfast, roasted vegetables and sweet potato at the main meals, berries and nuts to close the gap.
The rhythm is fixed, the menu is not
Four meals, pinned to the training day rather than to hunger:
- 06:45 — breakfast, before anything else happens
- 11:00 — the first real meal
- 15:30 — pre-training, deliberately light
- after training — the largest meal of the day
Fixing the times removes the decision. What goes into each slot rotates, but the slot itself never moves, which means I never negotiate with myself about whether to eat.
One prep session, then reheating
Saturday, 13:00–16:00. Everything for the week gets cooked once and goes into containers; Thursday and Friday portions go to the freezer so nothing sits in the fridge for five days.
This is the part that makes the rest work. A plan that requires cooking on a weekday evening is not a plan, it is a hope. The weekday version of the system is: open container, reheat, eat.
What is actually on the plate
The formula never changes: protein, a smart starch, something with fibre, and a source of fat or something fresh. Only the contents rotate, and the rule is that no dish appears in two meals in a row.
protein
220–250 g raw
- chicken thighs
- salmon
- turkey ragù
- BBQ drumsticks
- steak
- ribs
smart starch
80–90 g dry
- rice
- sweet potato
- potato
- pasta
fibre
200–250 g roasted
- broccoli
- zucchini
- carrot
- fresh tomato and pepper
fat, fresh
30 g
- parmesan
- olive oil
- avocado
- walnuts
Protein rotation is deliberate rather than incidental: fish three times a week, poultry five or six, red meat once or twice. That is a longevity bias, not a taste preference — though the steak on Saturday evening is the one meal of the week I cook because I want to, not because the plan says so.
Nothing here is exotic, and that is the point. Roasted trays of chicken, salmon, drumsticks and vegetables; one pot of turkey ragù in a triple batch; rice portioned straight into containers. Six oven trays running in parallel for three hours produce twelve or thirteen portions, and the week is done.
Calibration, not counting
I do not weigh food daily and I do not track calories long-term. The loop is:
- Hold the pattern for two to three weeks
- Watch the weight trend, not any single reading
- Adjust carbohydrate up or down
- Repeat
Scale weight on a given day is noise — water, salt, training load. The trend over weeks is signal. The other signal is strength in the gym: if the numbers on the bar hold, the deficit is not too deep. If they fall for two weeks, it is.
Body-fat percentage — never measured, so BMI is meaningless at this bodyweight and I am estimating composition from strength and how clothes fit. A DEXA scan would replace a guess with a number. Also unmeasured: how far the true maintenance figure is from the estimate. The calibration loop corrects for it without ever telling me what it was.