Eating Schedule – Part 1: What do I eat?
In the first part about my eating schedule, I want to elaborate on what I exactly did when I was dieting, what I did in the first six weeks of my lean bulking period, and what I do now at the moment to get to my ultimate goal. In another post, I will describe the different types of body types and eating schedules that fit for different purposes, although you will already see some variation in this post.
Consistency is key
I want to start off with one important rule: consistency is key here. If you do not like what you are eating, you are most likely not going to stick to your eating schedule in the long term. There is so much food, there will be no doubt that with a few modifications you can create your own healthy eating schedule that you actually enjoy all of the time.
Diet
In the first period, which was in February and March 2019, I started to just cut weight. I did not go to the gym, I did not do cardio, and I did no other sports next to it. Most people think that you need to do cardio to lose weight, but that is not true. I will explain this a bit later on in this post. At that time, with my weight and my height, I ate around 1500kcal per day, which created a 1000kcal deficit per day. This means that if I keep this 1000kcal daily deficit for over seven days, I lost in theory 1kg of body weight. Attached below this post are pictures of all the different meals I ate over the weight cutting period of 5 weeks. As you can see, all of the meals were in my opinion very delicious. However, I did feel some point of hunger at a certain moment, but by drinking enough water you can compensate for it. I would say that 1000kcal short per day is the maximum amount considered healthy. But I do have to say that I do not recommend you doing it for longer than 4 or 5 weeks. If you want to cut more weight after that, I recommend aiming for a 500kcal deficit per day.
Now I will link this diet back to cardio. As I just stated, it is important to not burn more than 1000kcal per day than you take in. So cardio can be a great help if you feel hungry and you want to eat but still, lose weight. You can, for example, eat only 500kcal less on a day, and then do cardio until you burnt 500kcal. Then you still have a deficit of 1000kcal per day. But if you can handle a lower calorie intake, you can skip the cardio.
Lean bulking
Until so far the dieting period. Let’s go to the lean bulking period of six weeks, in which I ate very clean. In this period I lost fat and gained muscle. What worked for me was the following: I, with my height and weight, ate between 2800kcal and 3200kcal per day. Including 200/220g of proteins. This means that on average, I ate almost 2.5g of protein per kg of body fat. You should not try to exceed that amount. This is already very extreme. I made sure that I drank enough water (I drink about 4-5L of water/tea per day) each day to not hurt my kidneys. With exercising 9 to 10 times a week, I burn on average approximately 750kcal per day. So that means that on average I had a net kcal intake of 2250kcal, which is actually quite low. But somehow, I managed to really stimulate my muscles in the gym and grabbing higher and higher weights every time. Every three days, I could grab 1 or most of the times two weights higher than the time before. And it just kept growing like this. So I saw no reason to change anything about my diet, it seemed to be working, so why change anything?
Here I will describe what I eat on a daily basis:
For breakfast, I eat cooked oats, with an apple and a banana, together with some cinnamon. This is nutritious and gives you energy slowly over the morning.
Between breakfast and lunch, I eat 3 scrambled eggs together with some spinach and with 100g of turkey filet: This is really the protein (+healthy fat) meal I need before heading to the gym.
After training, I immediately drink a protein shake.
For lunch I eat ‘cottage cheese’ together with a bit of oat and a bit of granola: again a lot of protein together with some carbs.
For dinner, I try to vary as much as possible with the vegetables I eat. But what is almost always on my plate is chicken, brown beans and rice. Sometimes I cheat a bit with pasta for example.
Then in the evening, I have a small handful of nuts: these nuts (when taking a small) amount, provides you with a lot of healthy fats and some remaining calories.
This is my daily eating scheme. Although, with eating this, I get only to about 2500kcal (this is also my cut build, which is explained next). So I still need to get some extra carbs in my body to get enough energy. The way for me to do it was to drink 2 carbohydrate shakes over the day. I drank one around breakfast and one around lunchtime. This way I got to 2800-3200kcal.
Leaner
After six weeks, I was already happy with the results of my muscle growth, so I decided that from now on, I want to get leaner. Getting leaner means for me to decrease my body fat percentage, whilst maintaining my current muscle strength. Two things are already important when I describe it like this. To maintain my muscle strength, I need to eat enough proteins to provide my muscles with enough energy to recover. The second thing is lowering my body fat percentage. The only way to do it is to burn more kcal on a day than that I take in. In order to still exercise every day, I decided that a 500kcal deficit is a way to go. If I do more, I am afraid that I might lose muscle strength, which is not my goal. So after some calculations (which I will explain in detail in another post), I found out that I need approximately 9 weeks from now on to get to just above 8% body fat.
So for the coming weeks, I am sticking to my diet plan mentioned above, without the carb shakes.
Cheat Meals
Let’s now talk about cheat-days. Did I do cheat-days? Well, personally, I did not cheat days in my first few weeks. I did not have the craving for fast foods, so I just kept on going. However, last few weeks I did sometimes crave for a pizza for example. I made sure that one evening I enjoyed every bite of a very tasty pizza, and still manage to not eat a surplus of calories. I just ate a bit less of the rest. Don’t do this too often, since you need the right proportion of proteins/carbs/fats (which is off the scale with pizza). However, a cheat-day does not hurt once in a while. Don’t forget. You are doing this to be happy. So treat yourself once in a while, don’t be too hard on yourself. But if you have a cheat-meal, try to stick as much as possible to your scheme for the rest of the day.
I hope this gave you some insights about what I eat on a daily basis, and why I eat certain things. In the coming time, I will upload more posts about eating schedules and how you should look at it.
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