Thread: How should I plan my diet?

Hey, guys!

I've been eating the same meals (4 meals) for 2 months now and as you can imagine I'm pretty tired of it, also I have a hard time making the meals because of school. I try to cook for the next couple of days but even with this
it's hard sometimes. So, I'd like to change my diet for something easier to manage. I have a couple of questions:

Where do you look for easy to make & budget friendly meals or meal plans? Or do you make up them and calculate calories & macros?
How do you make time to make your meals?
How many times do you eat a day?
Do you cook tasty and elegant or just put everything (rice, chicken breast etc) in a dish together and it's done (this is what I'm doing, I'm an absolute noob at cooking)? I'm worried about all those beautiful meals that I see on the web, meanwhile mine looks like crap.
What do you eat in/after school?

Also, feel free to write any advice or anything that you think was helpful to you. I hope this thread will help me and other teens who struggle with this.

I used to maintain a spreadsheet of foods I commonly eat with their calories and protein grams per serving. It would only take about 1 minute out of my day to just populate that with numbers to provide me with how many calories/protein in total I was getting that day.

It obviously takes some effort to get the numbers initially but it's worth it.

One key point is don't be too restrictive: you don't have to have 4 meals a day. You could have 2 big meals and 2 protein shakes for example.

You can also get required nutrients from ordinary foods like sandwiches and breakfast cereal. It doesn't all have to be brown rice, chicken breast and broccoli.

So basically meal frequency doesn't matter that much? Would 3 meals/day and 4 meals/day result in building the same amount of muscle mass as long as I eat the same amount of calories? Is this something that is proven by science? 3 meals/day would make a lot of things easier

Originally Posted by kisrobyyy

So basically meal frequency doesn't matter that much? Would 3 meals/day and 4 meals/day result in building the same amount of muscle mass as long as I eat the same amount of calories? Is this something that is proven by science? 3 meals/day would make a lot of things easier

To be clear: protein timing matters a little bit - but not that much compared to just reaching your daily needs any which way you prefer. Which is why I gave the example of 4 meals vs. 2 meals and 2 shakes.

Timing of other nutrients intraday is not that important at all.

If you want more detail, this is a very long discussion on the topic:

https://www.nutritiontactics.com/mea...ein-synthesis/