I was just curious, do you guys plan your meals a week in advance and write them in your log and then eat what you’ve planned, or do you do it daily, or do you just eat stuff and balance it on the fly? I’m realizing the “on the fly” method frequently leads to inaccurate results and screws things up (such as realizing that according to what you’ve eaten so far that day, you can only have a corn flake for dinner), so I think I’m going to start planning weekly. Was just curious what the rest of you folks adhered to.
The best thing that I found that works for me is planning 1 day at a time. I plan and prepare my meals at night before I go to bed, then when I wake up I have it all ready to go to bring to work. You can figure your cals/prot/carbs/fats then or if you have time at work you can calculate then. I usually just pack a bunch of different foods and eat what I need at work. Seems to work for me.
I have a deal set up with the guy at the Carls’ Jr. drivethru window and I just show up, he hands over my pre thought out meal and keeps track of it for me.
Texas, you are exactly right about totalling your calories daily, by the end of the day you can have celery stick…that sucks!! I usually like for my athletes to log up to five days (week days), because often I like to change the ratios (carbs and fats) based on how they look. The other reason is that the diet (caloric ratios) are typically easier to follow during the regemented work week.
I personally eat about the same thing each day. I will swap chiken and flax for tuna and flax or have salmon with my vegetables or something like that. I have my two MRPs and so on. That way I always know my intake. Tuesday may look just like Monday except I had chicken with my vegetables instead of tuna for example. That way I can swap foods with the same macronutrient breakdown and have consistency and variety.
I found a pretty easy way to track everything perfectly is using a spreadsheet like Excel. Sounds liek a pain but once you have it set up its great. I have all my daily food listed with its respective components, my CPF ratio on each meal listed, and a total calorie count and a final precentage calculated at the end of the day. Its pretty easy to update things if you know the basics of using a spreadsheet. I found out I was highly undereating until I did this. Now that I use it while on Massive Eating, my stomach is always full of the right stuff at the right time.