Sup, fam. There was some great, positive feedback from my introductory post for this new branch of content, so THANK YOU to anyone who checked it out! Much love to you all.
Now that we’ve filled your fridge a bit and got you some go-to ingredients, let’s go through a day of eating. Our goal here is to be in a calorie deficit and I’m shooting for about 1,800 calories a day. I go off the nutrition labels and try to measure stuff as close as I can, so I probably don’t have the calories and macros 100% accurate, but they’re close.
Meal No. 1 (lunch): Eggs and protein shake
This is what I eat for lunch most days of the week. It’s easy and though it sounds extremely boring on the surface, it tastes delicious. This serves as my post-workout meal. I typically don’t eat prior to working out, but maybe that’ll change down the line.
For this easy and nutritious meal, I started with a bunch of spinach and threw it into a pan with olive oil, salt and pepper. It’ll look like a lot, but as soon as spinach starts to heat up, it shrivels down to almost nothing, so don’t be scared to overflow the pan a bit if you want a more green-forward dish.
Once the spinach is cooked and shrunken, I tossed in a cup of egg whites. Generously season with what you like — I opted for a cajun seasoning blend this go around — and treated them like your typical scrambled eggs. Pull them from the pan and top with your preferred hot sauce or salsa, in this case, I did a couple tablespoons of habanero salsa to spice things up.
The shake is sort of a smoothie-shake hybrid. To a blender cup, I added a half-cup of frozen blueberries, a half-cup of frozen strawberries (or 7 chunks, according to the bag of frozen strawberries in my freezer), a cup of unsweetened almond milk, a cup of Greek yogurt, and one scoop of strawberries and cream protein powder and blended until it looked how it should.
The eggs and spinach came out to about 245 calories, 25 grams of protein and eight grams of carbs. The shake-smoothie tacked on 360 calories, 48 grams of protein and 36 grams of carbs.
Meal total: 605 calories, 73 protein, 44 carbs
Snack: Bag of Quest protein chips — 140 calories, 19 protein, 5 carbs
Meal No. 2 (dinner): air-fried chicken tenders
The evening meal is typically my favorite because I like to have a little more fun with it. I’ve got a bunch of fresh chicken tenders in my fridge, so that’s this week’s dinner theme. For these, I seasoned them heavily with salt, chili powder, paprika and cayenne. I pretty much just threw a bunch of stuff on them to see if it tasted good. They were decent, but not my best work.
I coated the bottom of my air fryer pan with nonstick spray and tossed my four chicken tenders in at 375 degrees for 17 minutes. I left them in about a minute long, so I’ll probably go 16 minutes next time.
Once finished, I paired them with a serving of Chick-fil-A sauce to get a few carbs in there and mostly because it tastes incredible. I thought I had another bag of cauliflower rice and I was not correct, so I ate half a bag of steamed spinach. The steamed spinach out of a frozen bag can be OK with some help from soy sauce or in this case, hot sauce, but it wouldn’t be my top choice. It’s not great.
Meal total: 405 calories, 58 protein, 15 carbs
I tacked on a “dessert,” which was a cup of Greek yogurt mixed with two scoops of strawberries and cream protein powder. It tastes somewhere between strawberry ice cream and strawberry yogurt. Good stuff with massive protein numbers — 375 calories, 72 protein, 14 carbs.
I came out a little short on the day, so I tacked on a rice cake with a serving of peanut butter spread on top for 225 more calories, 7 more protein and 15 more carbs.
DAILY TOTAL: 1,750 calories, 229 grams of protein and 93 grams of carbs.
This was my highest-protein day in recent memory. My goal is to be somewhere near the 175-200 range with under 100 carbs, but I’ll take it. Pairing a high-protein diet with a lot of water throughout the day will have you full for hours and hours even if the calories are down.
A big thanks to everyone for reading! I’ll try to condense these types of posts in the future. Much love and take care of yourselves.
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