Last week, I (Coach Erik) had an interesting conversation during a business association meeting regarding nutrition and how to eat healthy. One of our association members was talking about how he tries to eat clean, but it’s hard and expensive to find organic, pesticide free foods free from additives, dyes, and other “toxic” substances. This is EXACTLY the problem I have with many fitness influencers, the MAHA movement, and media coverage of nutritional topics. They fear monger to the point that your average, every day person doesn’t know what’s safe for to eat healthy, so they give up.
And it causes your Average Joe to miss the forest for the trees. When it comes to nutrition for general health and wellness, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit (excuse the pun). Food dyes, “toxins” (ask anyone using this word what specific “toxins” they’re talking about and watch them stutter and freeze), organic or not – these things are so far down the list of what is impactful that unless you’ve got everything else dialed in, they’re irrelevant.
The big things that people need to focus on to eat healthy:
- Eat protein with every meal.
- Half your plate should be veggies (frozen, canned, steamed in a bag, fresh, it doesn’t matter).
- Drink 1/2 your bodyweight in ounces of water.
- Eat within your maintenance calories the vast majority of the time (if you do 1, 2, and 3, this pretty much happens naturally).
I was also asked what I do to stay compliant. I’m not a good example – I’m not a small human, I’m lifting 6 days per week, doing additional cardio on top of that, and I average over 10,000 steps per day. My maintenance calories are 3600, and when I’m cutting, I’m still down at 2400-2800, which is far more than the average person is allotted.
But, to prove a point, I wanted to show that it can be fairly simple to eat healthy. Most people are wary of their budgets, in both time and money. There is an assumption that it takes a lot of time and money to eat healthy. This assumption is false.
To prove my point, I first set a caloric limit of 1500, with a focus on getting 30% of these calories from protein (110-115g). Then I leveraged ChatGPT and asked to create recipes for each breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for around 500 calories each, with 35-40g of protein. I asked it to include preparation and a shopping list. Lunch and dinner wound up being roughly the same thing, but by reentering the prompts, you can create many different recipes to from which to choose.
From there, I put together a shopping list and went to the store. I had to make a few changes (e.g. chicken sausage instead of turkey sausage), and upon viewing available purchase options for egg whites, it became clear that I could purchase enough ingredients for 4 days worth of food, so I had to ensure I accounted for this with each listed ingredient, but everything was pretty straightforward. For $70, and 30 minutes (including drive time), I purchased 4 days worth of food.
Up next: prep time. The key with this is smart multitasking. While your oven or grill is preheating, chop and season the ingredients that require it. Grilling and baking just require you to wait once you’ve done all the prep work and put food in the heat, so that’s when you can make sauces, dressings, finish chopping, etc. I was able to finish the egg white scramble while the chicken was grilling, making breakfast, lunch, and dinner, simultaneously.
After that, it was rationing the food, putting it away, and cleaning everything up. All said and done, it took an hour. It probably would have been faster if it weren’t 20 degrees outside – the grill takes longer to preheat in the winter. In any case, for $70, and 90-minutes total of time (maybe 95 if you count my ChatGPT time), I was able to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 4 days, keeping me under 1500 calories per day, and getting me 114g of protein per day. It really can be that simple.
The full breakdown is shown below in photo and video form. I hope you find this helpful, and I’ll see you in the gym!
