How to Build a 2,200 Calorie Macro Meal Plan in MyFitnessPal

Nikkiey: In this video, we are going to first build a grocery list playing the spin the wheel game. I get to spin three wheels: protein in one, carbs in the other, and fats in the third one. But the caveat here is I only get 10 spins. So am I going to use my spins towards all of the carbs, or majority protein, or fats? We don't know. I only get 10. And then from that is our grocery list. We're going to use that list to build a 2,200 calorie plan for one day with a macro breakdown of 240 grams of carbs, 165 grams of protein and 65 grams of fats.

Let's see what the wheel is going to decide on what we're going to eat in a day. By the end of this video, I'm hoping that you're able to see macros at a different angle, and you're able to take these concepts that I'm putting together with foods and be like, oh, I have these things in my house and I can go put this together for a meal plan for myself. And look at it as a game that you're playing. At the beginning of my journey, I played the macro game and called it the game of Tetris. So it's not meant to be daunting and draining, like this is a lot of work.

It is a lot of work, but it can be tons of fun. And you can find so much reward from doing what I'm going to show you that you can do today. So let's dive into it.

Here we go. I only get 10 spins, right? So I'm going to use the majority of my spins for the protein and the carbs, because those are two of the macronutrients that only have four calories per gram. So they're going to make up more in a day than the fats will. Fats have nine calories per gram, so I don't need as many fat options. So my strategy here is to take maybe four or five protein, maybe three or four carbs, and then maybe two or three fats.

Is that equal to 10? Anyway, let's spin it and see what we got for the protein. Nice. All right, we got chicken. We'll spin it again for protein. All right, we got tofu for my vegan babes. Let's go to carbs.

Of course, it would spit out my favorite carb source, which is a bagel. Okay, we got bagel. Let's do another carb. All right, we got oatmeal. Let's do one more carb. Just missed one option and got quinoa.

Let's move over to fats. Let's get some fats in here. So I've got five spins so far. We got almonds. That's six. Let me go back to the protein. Nice, we got egg whites. Let's do another protein. Nice. I was like, don't give me tofu again.

All right, got tuna. It would suck if I had to use one of the same proteins. I like that I'm getting different ones here. So we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So I have two more options. I need another fat. Let's get another fat in here.

Salmon. Ooh. All right. Salmon can also be a really good protein, so we got a bonus with that spin. We got protein and fat there. I've got one more spin. Let's go. Oh, this one's tough. Let's go with another carb.

It's four protein, four carbs and two fats. I might be kicking myself later when we're building the plan that we're only having two options for fats. Now, granted, the other options have a little bit of fat in them, but the carbs are only a bagel, oatmeal and quinoa. All right, we're doing carbs. A banana. There are so many better options on this wheel that I did not get, but it's okay.

It's all right. So this is 10 total. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Now let's take only these 10 items and build them into a meal plan, tracking inside of MyFitnessPal. So I'm going to open up MyFitnessPal. Here you can see we have the calories at 2,200, 2,205. Carbohydrates are 43%, making that 240 grams.

Protein is 29%, making that 165 grams. And fat is 27%, making that 65 grams. So let's go back to log food and start building this. How I would go about this is first putting in my protein sources. Let's build four meals, maybe five. Let's start with four. Let's start with egg whites, obviously, for breakfast. We have 150 grams, and I'm just going to put the protein into each meal.

I'm not going to worry about the grams or the ounces right now, because I can play around with the quantity at the end when I see everything laid out. So next, let's put in tofu. Let's just do the check mark, three ounces, again just putting it in to put it in. Next, let's add in some chicken, and then we will add in tuna. Because I don't eat tuna, and the same thing with the tofu, I have to look at the results in the MyFitnessPal database.

I would always barcode scan the foods that you have bought from the grocery store. But let's say, for instance, right now for filming this video, I don't have a canned tuna here. I'm just going to trust that the first one with the green check mark here is honest. But I also want to see the serving size and whether I can play around with the serving size for this one, and I can't. It only allows me a serving size of one can. So I'm going to go back and choose a different option. Let's try tuna, one cup, StarKist tuna. Let's see if we can change around the serving size.

Okay, we can. But as you can see here, they don't have gram options or ounce options, so I'm not going to choose that one. Let's try tuna canned in water, and this is a drained option, because I would want to eat it drained. Awesome, we have one gram and one ounce here. So let's go to one ounce, and just for purposes of placing in something, I'm going to put four in the number of servings, and that's four ounces. So those are my protein options that we have here. I still have 91 grams of protein that I need to hit in the day.

But again, I can play around with quantity, coming back to it at the end. I'm going to put the other food options in there. So with egg whites at breakfast, let's do a bagel. I mean, why not? And you're going to see me using the bagels that I use. Brands are different at every single grocery store. That's why I'm very pro not following meal plans. If you seek out meal plans for a program, they are restrictive in the sense that you can't have food freedom with what you would want to buy in a grocery store and what you would want to enjoy in a meal plan.

So for purposes of seeing what brands I'm using, I'm just using the brands I use. It may be a little bit different when it comes to you building your own plan based off of the quantity. But again, quantity is so easy to fix, and you'll see that here in a couple seconds. So then we'll move to meal two. Let's do quinoa with tofu. I don't have quinoa either and haven't used it. MyFitnessPal is pretty cool: it has best results or more results. So, best results. This one's quinoa, cooked, and the serving size has grams.

I'll just put in the number of servings. It's probably going to be upwards of 100 here, maybe 150, because it's like a type of rice. Yeah, so 150 puts me at about 31 grams of carbs. So we'll just add that in there for now. Meal three was chicken. This is an awkward meal. Actually, we can double up here, right? That was loud. We can double up here. So why don't we do chicken and oatmeal. I mean, macro meals can get weird sometimes.

So let's just roll with it. Chicken and oatmeal. And then the last one was tuna. And the other option on here for the carbs is a banana. Honestly, that's a great post-workout meal. There are no fats there. We'll just plug that in there for now. Okay, so going back and looking at the meal plan so far, there are 99 grams of carbs left. And actually, let's go back to that protein. Remember I said that I had 91 grams of protein still left for the day? Now it's at 68.

So those food items that I used also have protein in them, just at a smaller scale than lean sources of protein do. So that ate up some of my protein. I like that, but I still have 99 grams of carbs, so we're definitely going to play around with those quantity numbers at the end. Next up, fats. We've got almonds and we've got salmon, and I'm at 52 grams of fat right now. So with plugging everything in, we started at 65 and now we're at 52. That didn't really eat up as much of my fats as I was hoping it would.

This is where I had a feeling that I would be kicking myself for not picking another fat. So we're going to have to add in a dicey amount of almonds here somewhere. Let's add the almonds in with the tofu and the quinoa. One ounce of almonds gets me 14.2 grams of fat. Almonds are pretty dense, so one ounce, I can't imagine, is not that much. So let's go to 28 grams of fat. All right. Almonds, you are my jam right now.

So two ounces there. Then we have salmon. Let's add a fifth meal. We already have tons of protein, but salmon is a great fat too, a healthy fat. So let's make a fifth meal and have salmon. Let's do the second one here, because I see ounces and I like ounces. That got me 35 grams of protein and 14 grams of fat for six ounces of salmon. So my numbers are actually pretty solid after putting everything in, but I'm definitely going to want to add a carb source to that fifth meal,

because all we have there is salmon. So let's double up on the quinoa with the salmon and see what that puts us at. All right. Word. I'm liking these numbers here. So what's left over, where we now just need to play around with the quantity, is 55 grams of carbs that we need to add into one, two or three of those five meals. There are seven grams of fat left, so it's a little dicey there, because with macros, the goal is to get within plus or minus five grams in each category. So I have about two to seven grams to play with for fats.

And then we have 15 grams of protein left. So let's first play around with these carbs, because the carbs may pull from the other macros. I'm going to try and choose carbs that don't have a lot of fat in them. So my first go-to is a banana, because bananas don't have tons of fat. In meal four it's getting 25 grams of carbs, so we can totally up the carb count there. Let's do 150 and see what I get there. 34 grams, 46. That only took away nine. Let's see what else. We could probably up the oatmeal, but I know the oatmeal is going to pull from the other macros.

Let's just up the quinoa a bit. Let's do the quinoa with the salmon: instead of 150, bump it up 20 more grams and see. Let's do 40 more grams. This is why it's so important to track ahead of time. Track the day before. Log all of your meals so you know what you're going to be eating the next day. Then you can just measure it all out and put it in your fridge. And in the morning, when you're on the go and you've got to get the kids to school and you've got to get to work, you just pull your meals out and you're ready to go for the day. Okay, so bumping up the quinoa to 190 there

only knocked me down to 38 grams of carbs. It took one from fat and a few from protein, actually. So let's up the quinoa in the other meal to the same, 190. It doesn't have to be the same; I'm just showing you for purposes of moving around the quantity. Okay, so now there are 29 grams of carbs, 5 grams of fat and 11 grams of protein left. What else can I bump up? Let's bump up the oatmeal. I know it's going to take from both protein and fat. This is the instant oatmeal.

Let me revert back. This is an instant oatmeal, and it's only one packet. I want to use the quick oats. So, all good, swap in the quick oats. Let's bump it from 0.5 cup. Actually, this may give me more carbs. Well, I can use either oatmeal, right? One brand is just dry quick oats, and then I can use the instant, and instant just adds more flavor, in my opinion. So let's do it. Let's go. Okay, so I have two grams of carbs left, three grams of fat left and six grams of protein left.

As an easy hit to get the protein down a couple more into the plus or minus five, I'm going to go to the egg whites and up the grams of my egg whites to 165. That should do it. Let's go. I've got some room to play, but this is the plus or minus five. I'm in the plus for each of the macronutrients. I'm left over with two grams of carbs, three grams of fat and four grams of protein. Two, three, four. Never seen that happen, to be honest. And a couple of calories left.

But the calories: I get this asked all the time. Do the calories matter here? Sometimes calories are in the negative, or calories are left over in the positive. Maybe there are 80 calories left, or you're at negative 150 calories. That's okay. The only thing that matters here is that you're plus or minus five grams for each of the categories of macronutrients, that being protein, fats and carbs. Now, if you are negative 200 calories, then I would recommend looking back at the nutritional label and cross-checking that what it says on the label is exactly accurate to what you logged for the carbs, the protein and the fats, and vice versa if you're in the positive.

So there you go. We just tracked a full day with five different meals for a 2,200 calorie plan with a breakdown of 240 grams of carbs, 165 grams of protein and 65 grams of fats. Now, if your head is spinning after that video and you're thinking, that was so cool how it was all put together, but I'm struggling, I think I could do it but I don't know if I could, and I would love more accountability, then check out WarriorBabe in the description below. You can work one on one with our amazing coaches, and they will guide you through the process so you feel more confident when it comes to nutrition.

And when you're confident when it comes to nutrition, you're going to be able to get the results you want with your body composition. So go click that link right now. Until next time, I'll see you later. Peace.