Now that we have determined how many calories, proteins, carbs and fats you should eat every day, we have to come up with a meal structure. Meal structure refers to how your diet is set up, taking into consideration the four following variables, number of meals, protein intake around activity, carb intake around activity and fat intake around activity. With meal number, anything between three and eight meals per day is both effective and realistic. Like I said, in a lesson on meal frequency, you can get away with only two meals, but it makes things more complicated than they need to be. For this lesson, I'm going to assume that our 180 pound man eats five meals per day. If you eat fewer meals, then don't worry and simply combine two meals.
So step one, and our meal structure is done and we now have to add the right macro intakes for each meal. Let's start with protein. In general protein timing is not a very important factor in your diet as long as you consume some sort before and after your workout. In the lesson on pre and post workout, you learned that there should be around 0.2 grams per pound of your target body weight. Let's assume he wants to roughly maintain his body weight, so you would have to consume around 35 grams of protein, pre and post workout. This leaves us with 75 grams of protein that we will have to evenly consume throughout the day.
Onto carbs. Just as with protein you want to provide your body with carbs before and after your workout. And again, it should be at least 0.2 grams per pound of your target body weight. Since going higher than this isn't really a problem as these are some simple guidelines. I will assume that our 25 year old it's 0.3 grams before his workout and 0.4 grams afterwards workout as he just got out of the gym and is hungry. This still leaves us with 145 grams Have carbs for the rest of the day.
How you divide them up is really up to you. You might want to eat a large breakfast or maybe a snack before bed. For the sake of simplicity, I will divide the remaining carbs up evenly among the meals, but feel free to change this up according to your lifestyle. last on the list is fat timing. Fat time should be the least of your concerns, since it really doesn't matter. Like I said before, the only time it can have a negative impact is right before your workout as it slows down the digestion of both carbs and proteins.
So if you eat your pre workout meal very close to your workout, keep this in mind. At this point, though, I think things are complicated enough. So I will just evenly divide the 60 grams throughout our meals. This leaves us with the following meal structure. Now as you know there are additional calories needed to reach the TD of 2600 which would be either fat carbs, feel free to add them to any meal you like. Your largest meal will probably be either your breakfast and or your pre and post workout meals.
So they are always a good option.