#044 Meal Prep

Welcome back to the 44th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

By now, you all know that you need to nail two things if you want to be successful in your fitness journey:

1. Training

2. Nutrition/Diet

You won’t see results if you do only one of both things.

But sadly, many people fail to be consistent with their diet. This is the reason why most people in the gym look exactly the same after their initial newbie gains, despite training multiple times per week.

Broken down to the basics, getting your nutrition right is quite easy. There is a specific amount of calories and protein you have to eat, and if you do that (and train hard), you will see results.

But then there is reality. You are coming back from work and don’t know what to eat, so you quickly stop at a fast food chain. Or you are hungry at home but are too lazy to prepare a proper meal, so you fall back on a quick solution that will destroy your macros for that day.

To avoid that, we should make it as easy as possible for ourselves to hit our macros. If we think back to last week’s newsletter about habits, we don’t want to be in a position where we need to think about what we want to eat. We want to eliminate as much thinking as possible.

If we think in levels from beginner to advanced, it would look something like this:

1. Beginner: You don’t do any planning and only think about what you want to eat shortly before your meal.
   Downside: High risk that you won’t hit your macros due to short-term planning

2. Intermediate: You plan each day ahead the day before.
   Downside: Still a high risk that you will fail the day because you need to buy ingredients every day due to your lack of planning

3. Pro: Each weekend, you are planning out the week ahead to hit your macros and buy all the ingredients necessary
   Downside: Still (low) risk that you are too lazy to cook the meal you had planned

4. Pro (Advanced): Building up on 3, you are not only planning the week ahead but you are also cooking the meals in advance. You are meal prepping to make sure that you have all meals available when you need them.

If you are truly serious about wanting to reshape your physique, I highly recommend you to be at least level 3 or even better 4. I’m by no means saying that you need to meal prep to be successful, but remember this:

Every meal you prepare in advance is a meal you don’t need to cook during the week.

How to Start Meal Prep?

We start our meal prep by meal planning. And for that, we need to know our target calories and protein. Once we have those established (use this calculator if you don’t now where to start), we can get into the meal planning.

For meal planning, it is incredibly important that you are realistic and honest with yourself. It makes no sense to plan meals that may have great macros, but you know that you don’t like the taste or will get sick of them if you eat them every day.

It is also important to plan your meals according to your plans for the week. Do you have to go to work or university? Are you traveling? …

Whatever the reason, trying to fit your life around your meals never works. Do the opposite. Let the meals fit into your life.

With your plan for the week and your macro targets established, it is now all about filling the days with meals that match both.

If you need to be inspired by what you can meal prep, simply search for it on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. There are plenty of accounts focussed on meal prepping. I’m sure you’ll find recipes you like.

But obviously you don’t need to meal prep all meals for the week.

I’d say the more meals you can prep, the better, but even if you only prep 30% of the week’s meals, that’s already a great start. This means that you have laid the foundation that 30% of this week’s meals will be as planned. You only need to worry about the other 70% from now on.

A lower margin for error.

But also with meal prep, there are different styles you can follow.

Types of Meal Prep

Macro Meal Prep

The first style of meal prep is what I would call a macro meal prep. If meals are numbers for you, then this is your diet style. You have one meal, and you eat it every single day because its macros are unbeatable.

Classics are broccoli, chicken, and rice for a cut and a bowl with beef, avocado, and rice for a bulk.

The pros are obvious. You don’t need to prepare many different meals. You only have one meal you need to prepare, so your cooking time is reduced drastically. It is also a pro that the macros will be great, but as we were planning the macros out ahead, this shouldn’t be a problem anyway. There is also a good chance that this eating style is not as expensive if you fall back to simpler meals.

But there is also a downside to consider. This style can quickly get very boring and with each day/week, the risk increases that you can’t stand the food anymore and fail your diet because of that. And in the worst case, you overcompensate in the weeks after by eating a lot of crap.

And, coming back to the point of making life easy for ourselves, we are failing to some degree here. We aren’t making our lives easy if we have to force ourselves to eat food we don’t enjoy. That’s where we get to the next type of meal prep.

Advanced Meal Prep

To avoid that you are getting bored of your meal-prepped food choices, you can add more variety by prepping multiple meals. This has the obvious upside, that you are less likely to get bored of one of your food choices and therefore increases the chances that you stick with your diet.

On the downside, however, the time you need to meal prep increases with each meal. So, I wouldn’t recommend adding too many different meals to your plan. Unless, of course, you don’t mind spending the full Sunday cooking for the week.

A better option would be to prepare only 2-3 meals you eat throughout the week but have them rotate a bit each week to ensure variety.

If you want to spend less time meal prepping, there is also a third type.

Light Meal Prep

If you want to minimize the time you spend preparing your meals, you can also opt for a light meal prep. Here, you’d prepare only parts of meals that make it easier for you to prepare the meals during the week.

For example, you could prepare a big pot of chili con carne and then mix it with freshly cooked rice or pasta during the week, depending on what you want to eat at that moment.

Or you could cook a bunch of chicken, beef, and salmon (your key protein sources) in the beginning of the week and then mix it with frozen vegetables, pasta, rice, salads, bowls, or whatever you like.

The advantage of this light meal prep is that it provides you with a great base to hit your macros for that day, as you already have parts of your meals prepared. It also decreases the time you have to spend in the kitchen to prepare your meals.

On the downside, this approach requires more planning out of you to ensure that you are hitting your macros. Because for each meal you have to think again what you want to eat and how you want to combine it.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.