P+C Meals

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February 5, 2015 at 4:35 pm

What do I mean by a protein and carb meal? Protein and carb meals are mostly protein and carbohydrates with very little fat. I typically shoot for 5 grams or less of fat in my protein and carb meals.

Some foods that have plenty of protein but very little fat are:

  • chicken breasts
  • skim milk
  • nonfat yogurt
  • egg whites
  • cottage cheese (low fat or non fat)
  • whey powder

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P+F Meals

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January 14, 2015 at 4:39 pm

In order to properly carry out macronutrient grouping, you need to know what I mean by a protein and fat meal. Protein and fat meals are mostly protein and fat with very few carbs. To be considered a protein and fat meal I typically shoot for 10 grams or less of carbohydrates.

Some foods that have plenty of protein but are very low carb are:

  • chicken
  • beef
  • fish
  • nuts (almonds are the best)
  • eggs

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Meal Logging is Easy

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January 3, 2015 at 4:30 pm

The only way to guarantee that your body is running a caloric deficit and that you are grouping your macronutrients properly is to log all your meals. Before the rise of computers and smartphones this must have been excruciatingly tedious as it required keeping a notebook and adding up all the calories and nutrients that you had consumed every day. Luckily there are several websites and smartphone apps that makes meal logging relatively easy. The one I use and recommend to my friends is called Lose it. Lose It has apps for Android and iPhone or you can log online.

The interface to Lose It is quite straightforward. You just add food for every meal throughout the day, and it adds up your calories and nutrients. Lose It has thousands of foods in its database, but if you eat something that isn’t in the database you can add the food yourself (either manually or by scanning the barcode).  I find that if a food that I eat is not in Lose It’s database (which happens rarely) that I can find the nutritional values for that food on the internet and add it to Lose It as a new food. Once you add a new food it is saved to the database so you won’t have to add it again.

My friends who use Lose It find it takes a little getting used to at first, but once you’ve used it for a few days it’s very easy to record what you eat. This is especially true if your meals tend to repeat since you can add whole meals that you’ve previously eaten to your log for the current day. I find that it takes me less than ten minutes per day to record everything I’ve eaten. I don’t consider ten minutes per day a very large investment towards the goal of a sixpack.