Meal Plan Around Your Macros
EASY STEPS TO MEAL PLAN AROUND YOUR MACROS
Learn to count macros, tailor meals to your goals
We get it!! Figuring out what to eat to hit your macros is HARD!! It can seem so daunting! It is easy to just pick food and eat it, rather than looking at what do you have to eat in order to hit your protein, carbs and fats!
This game of macro tetris can be hard for some at first! BUT, whether you're a beginner just starting to track macros or an experienced veteran, there are some helpful tricks to make meal planning around your macros more manageable.
BATCH PREP
Batch prepping is a fantastic strategy to simplify meal preparation and save time. If you need even more tips here are some of our Meal Prep Tips. First, you want to make your grocery list and decide what is on the menu for the week.
If you're using chicken or ground meat in multiple recipes, it's smart to trim and cook them all together. A crockpot or instant pot works great for cooking lots of meat with minimal fuss. Cooking similar ingredients at the same time and then dividing them for different recipes is easier than cooking everything separately.
Portion your cooked and prepped ingredients into meal-sized containers or resealable bags, and be sure to label them with their contents and preparation date for easy organization. When it's time to cook, simply grab the prepped ingredients, reheat, or incorporate them into your recipes.
LOG “FUN MEALS” FIRST
Keep your macros in check by planning your meals in advance and fitting your other food around your pre-planned entries in your diary. You know you want Chick-Fil-A for lunch? Is it your birthday and you will for sure be eating some cake? It is girls wine night? Maybe it’s pizza night!
Practice honesty with yourself and record the foods you know you want to indulge in within your diary before consuming them. This way, you won't find yourself struggling to fit them into your macros later in the day, like playing a game of Tetris. This approach allows you to enjoy treats, sweets, and restaurant meals while still aligning with your goals, as you can plan your remaining macros around these choices.
BREAK UP MACROS PER MEAL
Isn’t it terrible to get to the end of the day and have 15g of fats left with 10g of protein, and you have ZERO CLUE what to eat to hit those. By break up macros per meals makes it easy that way you know exactly what of each macro to eat per meal it evenly spread your macros out throughout the day. Simply divide your daily macro goals by the number of meals you typically prefer to eat. There's no universally correct number of meals or snacks per day, so this could range from 3 to 6 meals daily, depending on your personal preference.
As an example, let’s say your macro targets are 150g protein, 65g fat, and 190g carbohydrates, and you typically have 3 meals and 2 snacks per day. To calculate how to break up macros, you’ll take all of your macro totals and divide by 5. This means you'd need to have approximately 30g protein, 13g fat, and 38g carbohydrates at each meal or snack to stay on track towards your macro goals by the end of the day!
If you found these tips helpful, you will definitely find our 4 week Building Better Habyts course, just the thing to make all the pieces come together for you around macro tracking! You NEED this if you want to learn to build ‘habyts’ the stress-free way!
Want to learn more about The Habyt? We offer a FREE discovery call where we can answer all you questions!