These two sample meal plans have been designed for a 200-pound male who consumes about 4,000 calories for bodyweight maintenance. The first meal plan is for your Baseline Days when you consume a little over 100 grams of carbs throughout the day. The second is for your Re-feeding Days when you take in about 400 grams of carbs.
As with part 1, we’ve based these samples on simple foods to help you understand how to construct your own meal plans. Feel free to make substitutions, but keep calories and macronutrients fairly equivalent.
This daily meal plan was designed to provide about 2,500 calories with 300–400 grams of protein and a little over 100 grams of carbs. Your total carb intake is 145, but this includes 16 grams of carbs from broccoli and 4 grams of carbs from lettuce. Vegetable carbs, which are high in fiber, are often considered by bodybuilders to be “free” carbs because their impact on insulin release is negligible. In general, you can discount the carbs you consume from fibrous, leafy, and cruciferous vegetables, which include spinach, cauliflower, arugula, romaine lettuce, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage.
Here’s our plan for how you can take in 300 grams of protein and 400 grams of carbs while keeping calories in check. Note that on your Re-feeding days you’re also going to spike calories by necessity. To keep calories from getting out of bounds, we’ve cut dietary fats somewhat to balance the additional 1,200 carb calories. When you make substitutions to our sample plan, choose very lean protein sources and carb sources that are very low in dietary fats.
