Meal Timing
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Now that we know how much you should be eating, we need to figure out when & what to eat. First up, "when."
For the next 14 Days, you will be eating 3 meals per day that add up to your macro targets, with an additional protein shake added before your workout on Training Days. As you've seen, there are four total rest days & three total training days, which will come on the days you can keep a consistent training time (More on Training in a bit) To find out how much to eat per meal, simply divide your macro targets on each day by three. Reference the picture below, & fill in your template based on your specific macros (how to track your macros will be covered in its own section): |
Example: These macros are for an example male on a training day. He would enter 25 for Fat Target Per Meal, 50 for Net Carb Target Per Meal, 13+ in the Fiber Target Per Meal & 50 in the Protein Target Per Meal. You simply divide your daily target by three.
As explained in the video, sticking to your meal times will be crucial, so do your best to plan your meals at times when you know you can consistently eat. This also means that you won't be eating outside of these mealtimes (a.k.a. snacking) for the at least the next 14 days, either.
A rule of thumb: when you select a meal time, you can give yourself a window of about an hour before that time & and hour after that time to consume that meal. For example: if you plan to eat your second meal at 1 PM, you have a "window" from 12 PM - 2 PM to consume that meal. You're not a slave to the clock.
Keeping your meals within these windows has major implications for what's known as your Circadian Rhythm. Meal times, along with training, waking & sleep times, are major players in creating this Rhythm, which optimizes your body to do certain things at certain times. Put simply: your body craves routine, and by eating at specific times, you're essentially training your body to better utilize those nutrients at that given time. If you stick to these meal times, your appetite will eventually sync up with this rhythm as well; you'll be hungry come meal times, but your hunger/appetite outside of the meal times will decrease.
On top of regulating appetite, keeping consistent meal times can boost your metabolism & reduce the amount of insulin you secrete in response to a meal. This is absolutely a tactic that I recommend you utilize beyond these 14 Days, as the benefits will continue so long as you keep the consistent meal pattern.
Schedule your meals backwards from your training session, and simply follow the same meal times on rest days (minus the protein shake). Even as beginners to training, you're going to want to make sure one of these meals comes within an hour of the end of your workout in order to take advantage of the "Anabolic Window." You may have heard of this term before, and if you've ever opened up a bodybuilding magazine, you've seen it smeared in big bold-faced font across every other page.
But this term has merit to it: in the hours following your training session, your body has nearly double (if not more) the ability to create new lean mass. This is due to an elevation in protein synthesis. Lucky for you, this increase in protein synthesis lasts MUCH longer for people who are new to training, and even people who are returning to training after a long layoff.
Your body adapts to what you consistently give it; this is especially true for strength training. Over time, your body becomes much more efficient at repairing the muscle damage from a training session, since it has been doing just that for years on end. But as a beginner, your body has no frame of reference; the stimulus sent to your body by training is something it's never experienced before, and it's going to take quite a while to return to the status quo.
And that's really good. This increased protein synthesis can last in beginners for up to 72 hours (yes, 3 full days) after a single workout. So while it may not be super important for true beginners to time their protein & calorie intake around their workouts just yet, it's a very good habit to get into. If you program things correctly, this "true beginner" status will only last a few weeks/months.
If at all possible, you should be training in the evening, starting your workout anywhere between 4 & 8 PM. I'll go into this in detail in the training section, but for now, let's use it to schedule our meals. If you train at 6 PM, and your training takes an hour, then you should be eating one of your meals at roughly 8 PM. Since you're eating three times per day, and you'll be sleeping 7-9 hours a night (non-negotiable, discussed later), you can afford to space your meals about five to six hours apart with ease.
In this example: 8 AM, 2 PM & 8 PM are your meal times. On training days, you'll consume an additional whey protein shake within the hour of the start of your training session (so in this example, around 5 PM).
Why the protein shake? Your body sends a much greater stimulus for strength & growth during a workout when there are already amino acids (the building blocks of protein) in your blood to start the workout. This is why I'll never recommend working out in a truly fasted (no food) state.
And ladies, don't let all of this "strength" & "growth" talk scare you away: gaining lean mass makes it much easier to lose fat & keep it off. Forever. And you won't get big & blocky; I know guys who have been trying to get big & blocky for years and it's not happening, so it won't happen to you "by accident."
Trust me; most (if not all) of the female figures who's bodies you envy are spending the majority of their time in a squat rack, not on a treadmill. Think of it this way: having more muscle = a higher metabolism = "Free Cardio" by sitting around and doing nothing. You're welcome.
Back to the original point, your protein shake will come about an hour before your workout, & your postworkout meal will come about an hour after in all scenarios.
If you lift in the morning, your meals may look something like this: 7 AM: Shake, 8 AM - 9 AM: Train, 10 AM: Meal 1, 3 PM: Meal 2, 8 PM: Meal 3.
If you train mid-day, maybe something like this would work: 8 AM: Meal 1, 12 PM: Protein Shake, 1 PM - 2 PM: Train, 3 PM: Meal 2, 8 PM: Meal 3.
You get the picture. Pick your training time, preferably in the evening, and schedule your meals around it in a fashion that you can stick to across every single one of the 14 days (& beyond). This simple change can do wonders for your physique by itself.
It's also prudent to eat your first meal within an hour or two of waking up, especially if you find yourself in the higher body fat % category for either gender (25% & up for males, 33% & up for females). By doing this, you can improve your glycemic control (and therefore your energy levels) throughout the rest of the day.
Intermittent Fasting (IF), or going a set amount of time without food, was all the rage recently in fitness circles. In some instances, it can be a convenient practice. But for anyone with a good deal of fat to lose, IF is impractical for a number of reasons. Not only can it compromise your glycemic control mentioned above, it can also reduce your the amount of calories you burn during the time you actually spend fasting (going without food), can reduce your insulin sensitivity for the rest of the day, and hamper your ability to lose fat.
Another way more intuitive byproduct is that fasting (and irregular meal patterns in general) makes you much more prone to overeating later in the day. This is because your appetite is disregulated, and you can easily rationalize overeating by saying "well, I skipped breakfast, so..."
I believe that this desire to go without food for long amounts of time stems back to a negative connotation people tend to have with food in the first place. When you view food as "evil" & the very reason you're not losing fat, it's easy to think that going longer without food is an quick fix. This may be true if fasting is literally the only thing preventing you from buying McDonalds or Taco Bell, but when you're eating the right foods, this is definitely not the case.
Proper intake fuels performance, and improved performance allows you to eat more via an increased metabolism. You can't have one without the other. By choosing the right foods (the next unit), you can "have your cake & eat it too." Except you're not going to want to eat actual cake.
To Recap:
- Select & stick to specific meal times across all days. No eating or snacking outside of these meal times. You have two-hour windows around each meal, so you don't need to stress to the second.
- Your meals should be roughly 4-6 hours apart.
- One of your meals will come within an hour of the end of your workout; on training days, a protein shake will also be used 30-60 minutes before your workout. Schedule your meals based on where your post workout meal falls.
- In addition, your first meal should come within an hour of waking up.
Now we know how much & when, so let's find out what the hell we should eat in the first place, shall we?
A rule of thumb: when you select a meal time, you can give yourself a window of about an hour before that time & and hour after that time to consume that meal. For example: if you plan to eat your second meal at 1 PM, you have a "window" from 12 PM - 2 PM to consume that meal. You're not a slave to the clock.
Keeping your meals within these windows has major implications for what's known as your Circadian Rhythm. Meal times, along with training, waking & sleep times, are major players in creating this Rhythm, which optimizes your body to do certain things at certain times. Put simply: your body craves routine, and by eating at specific times, you're essentially training your body to better utilize those nutrients at that given time. If you stick to these meal times, your appetite will eventually sync up with this rhythm as well; you'll be hungry come meal times, but your hunger/appetite outside of the meal times will decrease.
On top of regulating appetite, keeping consistent meal times can boost your metabolism & reduce the amount of insulin you secrete in response to a meal. This is absolutely a tactic that I recommend you utilize beyond these 14 Days, as the benefits will continue so long as you keep the consistent meal pattern.
Schedule your meals backwards from your training session, and simply follow the same meal times on rest days (minus the protein shake). Even as beginners to training, you're going to want to make sure one of these meals comes within an hour of the end of your workout in order to take advantage of the "Anabolic Window." You may have heard of this term before, and if you've ever opened up a bodybuilding magazine, you've seen it smeared in big bold-faced font across every other page.
But this term has merit to it: in the hours following your training session, your body has nearly double (if not more) the ability to create new lean mass. This is due to an elevation in protein synthesis. Lucky for you, this increase in protein synthesis lasts MUCH longer for people who are new to training, and even people who are returning to training after a long layoff.
Your body adapts to what you consistently give it; this is especially true for strength training. Over time, your body becomes much more efficient at repairing the muscle damage from a training session, since it has been doing just that for years on end. But as a beginner, your body has no frame of reference; the stimulus sent to your body by training is something it's never experienced before, and it's going to take quite a while to return to the status quo.
And that's really good. This increased protein synthesis can last in beginners for up to 72 hours (yes, 3 full days) after a single workout. So while it may not be super important for true beginners to time their protein & calorie intake around their workouts just yet, it's a very good habit to get into. If you program things correctly, this "true beginner" status will only last a few weeks/months.
If at all possible, you should be training in the evening, starting your workout anywhere between 4 & 8 PM. I'll go into this in detail in the training section, but for now, let's use it to schedule our meals. If you train at 6 PM, and your training takes an hour, then you should be eating one of your meals at roughly 8 PM. Since you're eating three times per day, and you'll be sleeping 7-9 hours a night (non-negotiable, discussed later), you can afford to space your meals about five to six hours apart with ease.
In this example: 8 AM, 2 PM & 8 PM are your meal times. On training days, you'll consume an additional whey protein shake within the hour of the start of your training session (so in this example, around 5 PM).
Why the protein shake? Your body sends a much greater stimulus for strength & growth during a workout when there are already amino acids (the building blocks of protein) in your blood to start the workout. This is why I'll never recommend working out in a truly fasted (no food) state.
And ladies, don't let all of this "strength" & "growth" talk scare you away: gaining lean mass makes it much easier to lose fat & keep it off. Forever. And you won't get big & blocky; I know guys who have been trying to get big & blocky for years and it's not happening, so it won't happen to you "by accident."
Trust me; most (if not all) of the female figures who's bodies you envy are spending the majority of their time in a squat rack, not on a treadmill. Think of it this way: having more muscle = a higher metabolism = "Free Cardio" by sitting around and doing nothing. You're welcome.
Back to the original point, your protein shake will come about an hour before your workout, & your postworkout meal will come about an hour after in all scenarios.
If you lift in the morning, your meals may look something like this: 7 AM: Shake, 8 AM - 9 AM: Train, 10 AM: Meal 1, 3 PM: Meal 2, 8 PM: Meal 3.
If you train mid-day, maybe something like this would work: 8 AM: Meal 1, 12 PM: Protein Shake, 1 PM - 2 PM: Train, 3 PM: Meal 2, 8 PM: Meal 3.
You get the picture. Pick your training time, preferably in the evening, and schedule your meals around it in a fashion that you can stick to across every single one of the 14 days (& beyond). This simple change can do wonders for your physique by itself.
It's also prudent to eat your first meal within an hour or two of waking up, especially if you find yourself in the higher body fat % category for either gender (25% & up for males, 33% & up for females). By doing this, you can improve your glycemic control (and therefore your energy levels) throughout the rest of the day.
Intermittent Fasting (IF), or going a set amount of time without food, was all the rage recently in fitness circles. In some instances, it can be a convenient practice. But for anyone with a good deal of fat to lose, IF is impractical for a number of reasons. Not only can it compromise your glycemic control mentioned above, it can also reduce your the amount of calories you burn during the time you actually spend fasting (going without food), can reduce your insulin sensitivity for the rest of the day, and hamper your ability to lose fat.
Another way more intuitive byproduct is that fasting (and irregular meal patterns in general) makes you much more prone to overeating later in the day. This is because your appetite is disregulated, and you can easily rationalize overeating by saying "well, I skipped breakfast, so..."
I believe that this desire to go without food for long amounts of time stems back to a negative connotation people tend to have with food in the first place. When you view food as "evil" & the very reason you're not losing fat, it's easy to think that going longer without food is an quick fix. This may be true if fasting is literally the only thing preventing you from buying McDonalds or Taco Bell, but when you're eating the right foods, this is definitely not the case.
Proper intake fuels performance, and improved performance allows you to eat more via an increased metabolism. You can't have one without the other. By choosing the right foods (the next unit), you can "have your cake & eat it too." Except you're not going to want to eat actual cake.
To Recap:
- Select & stick to specific meal times across all days. No eating or snacking outside of these meal times. You have two-hour windows around each meal, so you don't need to stress to the second.
- Your meals should be roughly 4-6 hours apart.
- One of your meals will come within an hour of the end of your workout; on training days, a protein shake will also be used 30-60 minutes before your workout. Schedule your meals based on where your post workout meal falls.
- In addition, your first meal should come within an hour of waking up.
Now we know how much & when, so let's find out what the hell we should eat in the first place, shall we?
