People, or you, ask me the same question over and over:
"What to eat?" (in sense of diet suggestion)
Actually, there is no general answer of this question and I cannot give a specific answer, nor can anyone do this (if however, this is a sign that he is bullshitting you or himself or both). So after some general explanations, that I already did in another article here (Food, Eat, Diet, Power, Sports, Shopping... (click)) people tend to get confused or tend to try to refuse what I've written there and ask me the following question:
"What exactly did you eat today?"
- OK I'll tell you!
Morning
I eat every morning more or less the same. Bread with some cheese and ham then with butter and strawberry jam and I am enjoying this with my milk coffee.
To make things in numbers:
Bread would be around 200g which makes it about 500 kcal and 20 g protein
Butter would make some 100-200 kcal, from about 10-20 gram
The jam with 75% strawberry has 180 kcal per 100 gram, so make it 300 kcal.
The milk has also some little ingredients like making it for some 3 g protein and 50 kcal.
The ham and cheese are about 100 gram together making around 200 kcal and 20 protein. (note be careful what cheese and ham you buy and read on the package!)
So we are landing at 1200 Kcal and about 45 g protein. Note that these numbers are pretty rough, and they vary a little bit, but I took the worst case however, rounding everthing in favor of the calories and harming the protein. Normally I would calculate those with 1000 Kcal and 50 g protein, but I took the worst case now.
It is also worth mentioning that all of my morning meal consist of fast calories (high glycemic index).
Midday
I normally don't eat in the afternoon, but depending on how I feel sometimes a banana, orange, or at most cheese croissant.
Lets say this is about 300 kcal (worst case again, with some small protein grams depending on what you've eaten).
Afternoon
I am about to do some sports, as I do every evening, so I need to eat some fast calories if I feel hungry (not everytime). Let's say I eat some bananas, some green tea with sugar and some corn snack, or banana or something sweet. In general, something like that to take some energy if I need. I might drink second coffee instead of the tea :)
Lets give this actions a weight of 500 kcal (should be also worst case and we add here also some eventual gramms of protein).
Dinner
In my normal schedule, what I need to eat in the dinner is a lot of proteins to recover after the training I just did. The last thing, what I need to do is to eat fast calories (will build up fat during the night) or a lot of salt (that will reduce the kalium levels and fuck up my regeneration). The dinner should have low glycemic index to allow the body to digest it the whole night and recover for the next day at its best.
So here are some very concrete examples of dinner and will start with Tuna with eggs and Tarator
Here the first short recipe of what I eat when I need to loose some weight like this month. Precisely to loose that weight in terms of body fat and retain the muscle mass. First we'll look at the products - for the Tarator (traditional Bulgarian cold soup) you'll need the products on the left side and for the Tuna - on the right.
For Tarator there are hundreds of recipes, however I firstly chop the cucumber and squeeze the rest products there (walnuts, garlic, dill, little bit pepper, salt, a very little bit lemon acid or juice, table spoon oil) and mix it all. I leave them like that for couple of minutes.
Then I put the yogurt with cold water (1:1).
I won't need to explain long how important is this soup after training, but just to mention it rehydrates you very fast and have very important vitamin ingredients and also a little bit protein.
So while I am eating this great soup I am cooking the tuna. It's very simple so it cannot be called real cooking, but however I'll explain a little bit:
Put the tuna and the rest products in the pan to fry without any oil or whatever. Note that the tuna has some oil in the can, but don't buy the cheaper one. You should have around 25 g protein and 200 kcal nutritions. If not so - buy pure tuna and put a little bit oil by yourself. Here I use for rest products some Spanish cooking fruit mix, some mixed nuts and some olives, but you can use whatever you want like bolonese sauce with onion or little bit rice or whatever you want! I also close the pan so that products can get damply.
After it is ready I eat it with boiled eggs. You can also put there whatever you want, like replacing the eggs with something else or just putting grated cheese on the eggs!
About the nutritions I can tell a few words too. For the Tarator it's about 10 g protein and about 200 kcal. And for the tuna I use one can, which is about 45 g protein and 400 kcal, then add the eggs for about 20 g protein and 200 kcal, and add some 10 g protein and something like 400 kcal for the rest products that vary by your choice. So this delicious dinner gave you about 1200 kcal and 85 g protein which is notorious! In days like these I eat couple more times during the day with about 800 kcal at most and about 45 more proteins so I land with 2000 kcal daily, where the normal need for me is about 3500 and I can burn easy 1 kg weight in one week even having couple of easy days, while retaining my protein, vitamin and mineral needs!
Other dinner choice may be Panagurski Eggs, which has a traditional recipe that I won't discuss now, but you can check in these websites:
http://thesimpleflavors.blogspot.com/2011/02/pork-chops.html (click) and http://www.multilingualarchive.com/ma/enwiki/en/Panagurska_egg (click)
I do it however slightly different using curd instead of yogurt. You can play with you own recipe, add different stuff and some other things to the menu. The main ingredients will lead you to about 700 kcal and 70 g protein.
Let's say you couldn't do all stuff right and you've eaten some 300 kcal more.
So we are ending up at about 3000 kcal and about 130 g of protein.
As discussed in the general article for food diet and stuff, you are gonna need about 1.4 g protein per kg body weight, so if you are like me about 70 kg you'll need some 100 g protein and considering, that the body is actually not digesting all of the protein right depending on different stuff like what kind of protein you've eaten and how much and in what combination of other food and what time, you are landing with 130 g today in the perfect schedule taking also 3000 kcal that might be even less, than I usually need for my schedule.
You might also notice, that we took the worst case and if you were very careful picking the products, with same menu you'll have about 2500 kcal and 140 g protein, which I am doing, as I am trying to do some diet. Normally I would need about 3500 kcal daily, and about 120 g protein. So this is also a perfect dinner :)
A third dinner choice just to mention could be just Spaghetti, which you can choose wisely in terms of protein kcal levels (choose eggs spaghetti). You'll need about 150 g spaghetti, and those I buy have about 16 g protein and about 300 kcal so I'll have some 25 g protein and 450 kcal. Then some 100 g cheese that should be about 350 kcal and 30 g protein at least. Then the bolonese sauce that should be in best case with tuna or in worst case with some other meat and put there at most 600 kcal and about 20 g protein. So there you go - 75 g protein with 1400 kcal in worst case, and in the good case about 90 g protein and 1300 kcal!
So in conclusion I would like to mention that there is simply no need to suffer for your diet! You just need to be careful and do some physical activities! This diet samples consider that you exercise in the evening like after work or university or whatever. If you do it other way round you should change it a little bit. Anyway, physical activity is "must do". Think that you won't be millionaire by saving money! In same sense you won't loose weight with eating less. By doing this you actually might really loose weight and look thin, but your body will gather high levels of very dangerous inner body fat that leads to cancer and other bad diseases! So be careful and just do things right, it is much easier than doing things wrong when you get used to!