Meal Prep, Cold Protein, and Other Works of the Devil
How to make protein less miserable.
I’ll start this by stating the obvious. If you are interested in losing weight, or gaining muscle, or being the healthiest version of yourself possible, then you owe it to yourself to eat around your body weight in grams of protein. You weigh 200 pounds? Great, eat two hundred grams of protein from low fat cuts of meat. This has been standard advice from experts to random articles on bodybuilding.com to old school health magazines since before the internet existed. It’s good advice.
The problem is, no one really tells you how difficult it can be to hit that number. Quite simply, this task is rough on the taste buds. There was a time when I meal prepped every Sunday and had every lunch made for Monday through Friday. I have heartfelt memories of working my jaw through cold tasteless chicken breast in an attempt to hit my protein numbers for the day. There were times where my gut would say, “No more! Please. We can’t do another bite!” and then I throttled that fucker and choked down another tasteless piece of cold tasteless misery. Ferda gainzzz baby. Ferda gainzzz.
Thankfully this is no longer my life. Eventually this iron minded behavior broke down, and there were days where I missed my protein numbers. I figured I was just weak willed, that if you couldn’t override your own biological signals then you just didn’t want the cool-steal-sex-appeal that came with eating low fat cuts of meat. My life spiraled. And just before I was about to take my sword to Valhalla*, like Siddartha rediscovering “OHMMM**,” I stumbled upon a youtube video with the golden words that saved my life. “Taste matters.”
I had been trying to white knuckle it at the dinner table for so long through cold meal-prepped food that it had never occurred to me that if you improved the taste of your food you might actually be more likely to finish it. Basically, I had to think like a food scientist. How is it that I can devour a large 2,200 calories in the form of a large Domino's pizza without blinking, but I struggle with 500 cal’s in the form of a chicken breast? How do I make low fat cuts of meat delicious? Better, how do I make it addictive?
Well kids, give this a shot.
*Well now this is getting dramatic
**If you haven’t read it, Siddhartha really is a fantastic novel
Actionable Advice
Step 1: SALT YOUR FOOD: If you grew up in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 2000s then you probably grew up with the media and “nutrition experts” demonizing salt. This is broken knowledge and you need to throw it out. Sodium is an essential nutrient in our life, and as long as you’re eating a diet that doesn’t have a boatload of processed crap, you should absolutely be salting your food. How much? To taste my good friend, to taste. Make it delicious, do not deprive yourself. (reference the salt fix)
Step Two: HOT AND FRESH: For me, the meal prep life was convenient….and it also didn’t work. I was excited to eat my food on Monday and get back on track from a less than productive weekend, and then by Wednesday I was dreading the meal. By Friday, there were literally a couple of days where I actually yakked. I wasn’t hitting my protein numbers fer da gainzzz….and that was simply unacceptable. Eventually I decided I would get up a half hour earlier and cook all my food for the day fresh. That was a game changer. Suddenly every meal was far more palatable than the reheated version was, and my jaw was suddenly able to chew again.
Step Three: THERMOS + CHICKEN BROTH IS LIFE: If step two was about hot and fresh, step three is how to keep it hot and fresh. Some of you (like myself) still have a location to go to for work. We can’t just buy an oven and get our chef on at work….however, we can flex our chef skills in the morning and keep it hot as opposed to reheating in the microwave. Enter the thermos + chicken broth life.
Cook Low Fat Protein (with salt) and dice it up into tiny squares
Cook some rice and mix up the meat and rice together in a big bowl
Shovel the rice-meat mix into a thermos
Bring some chicken broth to a boil
Pour that chicken broth into the thermos and fill it until the mixture is moist…but not necessarily swimming….unless you’re really craving some soup.
And then BOOM! Enjoy a steaming hot fresh meal that you can open up as far as 16 hours later and still enjoy. I have been doing this for over two years now every single day I’ve had work, it’s been an elegant solution to staying on track and caring for my taste buds.
Step 4: FRUTOSE: If you’ve tried the other steps and you’re still feeling full before you want to, try this with some caution. Back when I was on the gainzzz train I always felt full. One of the tricks I picked up from reading Stan Efferedings, “The Vertical Diet” was to add a quarter cup (YES. A QUARTER CUP. MEASURE IT) of orange juice to every meal. Stan’s argument was the fructose in the orange juice stimulated the liver and helped you digest food faster. I have no idea about the science behind this, all I know is that when I started trying this for myself my hunger shot through the roof even though I was in a caloric surplus. Try this with caution and accurate measurement. If you’re attempting to lose weight instead of gain I would recommend a piece of fruit instead of the juice itself.
Step 5: SEASONING/HOT SAUCE: As long as there’s nothing in the ingredients that bothers your gut, let it rip! The hard headed idiot 20 year old in me believed taste was for the weak, the wiser 30 year old in me says to chase goals with joy. Experiment and see what works for you.
Try these steps and see how it goes. All of these steps have provided a solid breakthrough with how I consume food. Hit that goddam protein number and reap the benefits. Godspeed.