How to Plan a 150g Protein, 2,000 Calorie Day in Advance

Nikkiey: If you're struggling to get 2,000 calories or 150 grams of protein in a day, I'm going to break down my meal plan for you and show you how simple it was to put this all together in under 20 minutes. Let's dive into it.

What's up, you guys? With this video, I want to show you my breakdown of my daily meals. Overall, these five meals make up 2,000 calories, 150 grams of protein, 240 grams of carbs and 55 grams of fat.

I'm literally going to walk you through it. It's the end of the day right now, so I am planning my day for tomorrow. I know so many women that I have talked to, helped and coached. One of the biggest things I see them fail on or stumble on, or feel is the hardest thing to do when it comes to tracking macros or planning meals in advance, is that they plan as they go throughout the day. Meaning they eat their breakfast, then they log their food, then they have lunch, then they log their food, then they have a snack, then they log their food. And by the end of the day they have 50 more grams of carbs they have to eat, 40 more grams of protein they have to eat, and they're like, how do I get this food into my day?

And they're making up some weird recipes to try to get it in by the end of the day. What I like to call that is macro hoarding, and I've always joked through the years of coaching that that is the next documentary on Netflix. There's a saying: fail to plan, plan to fail. And it's so true. So let's get into it.

Meal one looks like this. I have one full egg. I'm going to plan all my meals, put them in Tupperware, and show you what that looks like, because I know you probably do that too. But I'm not going to cook my breakfast, because many of you probably have the time to cook your breakfast in the morning, as do I. I'm still going to put all my other meals in Tupperware and have them ready to just pull out of my fridge tomorrow.

So I have one egg for breakfast, and I pour in about 150 grams of egg whites. I put the bagel in the toaster, and then I put cream cheese on top. This has literally been the meal I've had for the last two years, like I shared with you.

This meal consists of 467 calories. It breaks down to 31 grams of protein, 48 grams of carbs and 15 grams of fat. So this is meal one. Put that off to the side.

Meal two I'm going to prep right here with you. I'll never be able to say this right. Fage yogurt, peanut butter and a banana. Let me get a bowl and a spoon. This is my good, trusty old food scale.

Actually, hold that thought. We're prepping for tomorrow, so it wouldn't go in a bowl. It would go in Tupperware. So put that there. We need 200 grams here. That barely made it. So that's 200 grams of yogurt.

I need two tablespoons of the peanut butter, so that's 32 grams. What I do is put the peanut butter on the scale and tare it so I'm at zero. Then I pull out the peanut butter, and that gets me to negative 32. This is what two tablespoons of peanut butter looks like.

What I used to do, when I wasn't really into fitness or didn't understand nutrition, is eat half of this peanut butter jar. And that's a ton of fat grams, because there are 17 grams of fat in two tablespoons. So imagine if you're someone who's like, give me all this peanut butter. You're going way over on your calories. This is what two tablespoons looks like.

Exactly negative 32. This is two tablespoons, my friends. This right here is 190 calories: 17 grams of fat, 7 grams of protein and 6 grams of carbs. I don't know about you, but I would eat four spoons filled like this, which is eight tablespoons. Did I do that math right? Yeah.

There's my peanut butter. And because I don't want my banana to brown, I'll keep it off to the side and just peel it tomorrow and mix it all in. Meal two, done. This is 438 calories, made up of 27 grams of protein, 48 grams of carbs and 17 grams of fat.

Next one. This next meal is chicken apple sausage. I have to cook two links, and then I have to put the rice in the microwave. I just need two links here. This is how you know I'm not a cook. I like to cut the sausage. It's just much easier. Comment below if you do this too. I cannot be the only one.

Now this is to cook. It comes cooked, which is nice, but it needs to be heated up. And if you don't have this in your nearest grocery store, you must find packaged brown rice, or rice in general, because it's a game changer. You don't have to cook it. All you need to do is slice it open a little bit. My hands are all sausage-y, so I'm going to cut it here, and pop it in the microwave for 90 seconds. Voila. Now we let it cook.

Even this meal takes five minutes to cook all together. I was just doing it for the camera, but what I typically do is literally just use my finger and flip it myself. Voila.

For reference, if you're new to following me, this is probably a shocker: I don't cook. If you've been following me for years, you know I joke about the fact that I am not a cook. I hate cooking. And it's pretty wild to think that I have achieved the results I have with my body composition over time and I'm not a cook. I literally just try to find the most basic of basic foods to make and consume. The one thing I do make sure of is that it's whole food and it's organic. That's really important.

This is done. This is already in MyFitnessPal as two links, so I don't need to weigh that out. However, the rice needs to be weighed. Voila, meal three.

With meal three, my friends, and I'm going to let that air out a little bit, I will sometimes interchange these options with chicken and tortillas or ground beef and tortillas. Just for visual, I have chicken prepped, and these are the tortillas I like to use. I'll have two tortillas and about four or five ounces of chicken. So that's usually interchangeable with meal three.

Anyway, meal three is made up of 443 calories, 27 grams of protein, 17 grams of fat and 44 grams of carbs. If you're keeping track, you'll see that the split between protein, fats and carbs is pretty similar across the meals, the balance of the three macros.

When people think, oh my god, I have to eat 150 grams of protein, it's like, we'll break that down into five meals. That's exactly what I'm doing here. To remind you, meal one was 31 grams of protein, meal two is 27 grams, meal three is 27 grams, and the next one is around 25. The last one is actually a little higher at 38. You can see it's just breaking it down into smaller numbers to make up the meals you're seeing in front of me.

Now we move on to meal four. This one is also a staple. It's been in my routine since I really started in the fitness world, eight or nine years ago. This is my pre-workout meal: oatmeal and egg whites. And this is what it looks like being made. It doesn't involve the stovetop.

This was actually something someone DM'd me, because people know I don't like to cook. They told me I can eliminate that step, and eliminate the cleanup of the pan and all the other things. So this will amaze you. I'm going to do this right here and pop it right in the microwave, and it's going to be phenomenal.

I use two different types of oatmeal: the quick oats and the maple brown sugar. The maple brown sugar is really for flavor, because the oats are pretty bland by themselves. I do about 40 grams of the quick oats and one full packet of the brown sugar. Then I do about 150 grams of egg whites.

Voila. A little bit of water, because if you just do this in the microwave it clumps together and doesn't come out nice and smooth. Then pop it in the microwave for two minutes. While that's cooking, I'll give you the breakdown.

It consists of 382 calories, 24 grams of protein, 58 grams of carbs and 4 grams of fat. Let me give you a little bit of education here. This is typically my pre-workout meal, so what I like to do is load up on carbs and keep the fat on the lower end. Fat is double the calories per gram. Fat is 9 calories per gram, whereas carbs and protein are only 4 calories per gram.

The higher the fat, the longer it takes your body to digest. So your body is focused on digesting the food rather than giving you the fuel it needs to perform in your workout. I don't want that. I don't want my body focused on the digestive process. I want my body focused on giving me energy, which is going to come from the protein and the carbs. That's exactly why this meal has only 4 grams of fat and more carbohydrates. I need that fuel going into my lift.

I typically eat this meal about 60 to 90 minutes out from exercise, because oatmeal is a complex carbohydrate. It takes longer to digest, but it gives longer sustained energy. Basically, I won't get into my workout and crash and burn within 30 minutes, like I might with a simple carbohydrate. With this, I'll have sustained energy through an hour-long workout.

Let me go grab that. Whoa, that's hot. See? I didn't have to cook this on the stove. How cool is that? One less thing to clean up. It turned out great. It's delicious, trust me, because I've been eating this for many, many years. This meal beats meal one for the length of time I've been eating it. So there is meal four.

Last but not least. Let me say something here, because I'm going to bring out my post-workout shake, and it's literally just a protein shake and a banana. These meals here, I'll sometimes shift to meal two or meal three, and then my protein shake is meal four.

These meal ideas can all be moved around. It doesn't have to be that MyFitnessPal says meal one through five, so I have to eat meal one through five in that order. The only two I'd say you have to be strategic about are your pre-workout and your post-workout. All the others can move around any which way you want. If I want breakfast for dinner, I can move this to dinner. I can have this for breakfast. I can move meal four, the oatmeal, to meal two, and then the post-workout. And if I want to finish my night off with something sweet, cool, I can do the yogurt, the banana and the peanut butter.

Let's make that protein shake. Since this one is super easy to put together, I'm not going to blend it up with the almond milk and mix it all together, because it may not hold up overnight to drink tomorrow, especially with the banana, which is going to brown.

What I do is pour in some almond milk, usually about the one-cup serving size on the back of the nutrition facts. Then I do two scoops of protein powder and blend it up with a banana. Sometimes my day already has a banana in it, so sometimes I'll mix in some honey instead. It's so, so good, and so good for you.

For the sake of this, I'm not going to blend it all together. But this last meal is the protein powder, the almond milk, and a banana and/or honey. I'm not factoring in the honey here; what's factored in is the banana. That's 309 calories. And actually, this was about two and a half to three scoops of protein, because I needed to get my protein up for the day. I literally just added one more scoop so I would hit plus or minus five grams on my protein for the day.

So this meal is 309 calories: 38 grams of protein, 2 grams of fat and 38 grams of carbs. Same reasoning as I already shared. The fats are low so my body can digest the carbohydrates and go through the glycogen refuel process that happens after working out, so I can start healing, repairing and building my muscle.

So, you guys, this right in front of you, plus another banana, is 2,000 calories. Can you just take a look at this for a second and see that this is not a lot of food? If you're stressing about eating 1,600 or 1,900 calories, or you're being told you have to eat more food, this is 2,000 calories and some change, about 2,050 calories. It's not that much. You can do it. And it's really important that you're fueling your body the right way.

So this is a breakdown of what my meals look like. Now all I need to do is cover them up and put them in the fridge. Tomorrow, I just get to wake up and make my breakfast. Since I work from home, I get to come to my fridge a couple of hours after breakfast, pull out meal two and eat it. A couple of hours later, I come back and pull out my pre-workout meal, eat it, and go to the gym. I bring the shake with me so I can drink it after the gym, come back home, and voila, my last meal is there for me to eat.

Let's go, you guys. That is a successful day of planning your meals in advance. Being able to just pull out your food for the next day and eat it is the key to your success. Take all this information, and don't just sit there listening to me until you're blue in the face. Go do something with it. Go plan your meals right now, and you will see all the results you want if you consistently keep doing it. Peace.