#014 Full Week Nutrition Plan

Welcome back to the 14th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on owning the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

Today, I will share an exemplary 1-week meal plan with you. You can follow it precisely or take it as an example and adjust it to your needs. I would really like to encourage you to make a meal plan and stick to it. It’s way more likely to be consistent with your diet when you have a meal plan. And hence, make progress.

I hope you enjoy this newsletter.

The Boats & Logs Approach to Nutrition Planning

As promised, we will follow an effective minimum in our nutrition plan. That means we are focussing on getting calories and protein right every day and adjusting the rest along the way as we get more comfortable with our plan.

The reason for that is simple. Setting up a nutrition plan and following it consistently can be very hard if you have never done it before. If we believe that more than 90% of gym-goers don’t have a proper meal plan (Boats & Logs estimate), it’s pretty likely that the majority of our readers are also best served with a low-complexity starter plan. Therefore, I want to give you a basis to start from and develop into more advanced plans.

Making a general nutrition plan is impossible because people have their own preferences towards food, can’t eat certain foods due to allergies or religious reasons, or have to space it differently throughout the day.

Therefore, it’s quite simple: The best nutrition plan is the one you can follow and that fits into your life.

Important: Please don’t see this plan as a must-follow. It’s rather a rough guideline of what a nutrition plan could look like and should give you some ideas of what yours could look like.

Short Nutrition Recap

The most important metric we are tracking is calories. Whether your priority is to build muscle or to lose fat, you need to be aware of your calorie intake. I’m not going deep into the theory behind calories, as I have covered it multiple times. As a reminder, I copied a part from the Winter Arc guide. If you are unsure about the theory behind calories, check it out (link).

Besides calories, we are tracking protein every day. I have written about it more extensively here. But the one thing to really pay attention to is that you are consuming at least 0.7-1.0g of protein per lb of body weight (or 1.6-2.2g per kg).

To find a protein intake that works for most, I went with at least 150g. But for most days, we are closer to 200g. As you can see in the table above, most of you should be well-served with 150g of protein per day.

The other two macros are carbohydrates and fats. As we optimize for simplicity, we won’t cover them here. But both of them are important. Carbs are your muscle's favorite fuel, and you shouldn’t exclude them from your diet if you want to perform well in training. Fats are essential, too. Your body needs them for hormone production and metabolic processes.

Once you are comfortable and consistent with a meal plan covering calories and protein, you should move on and look at your carbs and fats intake. Maybe this will be another newsletter?

You can move on to micros once you are comfortable around the macros. But with 13 essential vitamins and 16 essential minerals, this would be too much to cover now. To give you a good chance at being sufficiently covered with all vitamins and minerals, include fruits and vegetables, eat fish, and have a balanced diet.

Caring about Your Success

To be successful in building muscle, we need to be consistent - in and outside the gym. A meal plan is a great tool to achieve consistency. But to be a great tool, a meal plan needs to fit a few criteria:

1. Good taste → You need to enjoy (most of) the food
2. Good digestibility → Your body needs to be able to digest the food well
3. Lifestyle fit → Preparing and eating the meals needs to fit into your lifestyle

While the first two points are obvious, the third one is often forgotten when setting up a meal plan. But I want to stress that many meal plans fail because they are too time-consuming to prepare. That’s why meal prep is such a good tool. It saves you time and makes sure that you eat the meals that match your goals.

It would be easy for me to only present you 3-4 different meals and repeat them over the days. But that would be a lazy approach. Instead, I tried to make the days unique so they can serve as an inspiration to you. You can, of course, copy this plan 1:1, but I would advise against it. You are most likely better off adjusting it to your needs and repeating a few meals across the week.

Good meals to make in bulk and store in the fridge are the Pasta Salad, Beef Goat Cheese Bowl and the Salmon Wraps.

That being said, let’s move on with the food plan:

The Plan

Info: Adjust to your needs by skipping snacks or making smaller meals (e.g. less pasta or rice)

Monday

Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs (4 eggs) - 350kcal & 30g protein

Snack: 30g Nuts - 200kcal & 5g protein

Lunch: Beef-Goat Cheese-Bowl (200g ground beef, 125g goat cheese, 60g rice, tomato, pepper, broccoli, chili sauce) - 1,000kcal & 60g protein

Dinner: Avocado & Egg on Bread (200g wholemeal bread, ½ avocado, 2 eggs) - 800kcal & 30g protein

Snack: Greek Yogurt with Honey (300g Greek Yogurt, 1 Tbsp. Honey, 20g Whey) - 650kcal & 25g protein

Total: 3,000kcal & 150g protein

Tuesday

Breakfast: Blueberry Shake (100g frozen blueberries, 50g oat flakes, 250ml milk, 30g cashews, 1 banana, 20g whey, 125g low-fat curd) - 950kcal & 55g protein

Snack: 30g Nuts - 200kcal & 5g protein

Lunch: Chicken Bowl (200g chicken breast, 100g rice, 100g sour creme, spinach, tomato, broccoli, pepper) - 700kcal & 60g protein

Snack: 40g Nuts - 250kcal & 7g protein

Dinner: 2 Chicken Burrito (250g chicken breast, 50g rice, 2 wholemeal wraps, 70g guacamole, pepper, onion) - 900kcal & 75g protein

Total: 3,000kcal & 202g protein