Question for men (or highly athletic women)

How do you manage a healthy 2,500-3,000 Calorie diet? At my height and activity level 2,500 would be my very educated guess for a 500 Calorie deflicit, and 3,000 would be maitenence.

It seems like that's a lot of food to eat honestly. I've been sticking to my deflicit, but I've been ignoring how healthy foods are all around. People who are on a diet that require this much... what's like an example day (or week if you're bored) of food you'd eat?

I know fruits and veggies are good, but honestly when I look at some diet's requirements, I'd have to eat a whole forrest a week to even come close to the amount of calories I need. Most people on this site are looking for low calorie meals/snacks and stuff... but I'm actually looking for fairly high calorie things that are not a big health risk if I eat it every day (or every other day).

For the record, I'm keeping my 500 calorie deflicit until I'm under 15% Body fat (At 20% now), then I'm switching to maitenence and going to hit the gym quite a bit harder than I do now.

After years of eating one big lunch everyday, and no other planned meals, I actually found it hard, at first to eat more than about 1400 calories a day.

Now... not having such a hard time.

Caveat: I hit the weights pretty hard while still maintaining a calorie deficit, therefore I go quite heavy on the protein. A sample day might look like this:

Breakfast:1.5 servings of oatmeal, a yogurt, two hardboiled egg whites or 4 oz of steak, two scrambled eggs with a spoon of fresh salsa on them, and a yogurt.

Morning snack : A piece of fruit (I mostly eat apples or pears) and some cheese

Lunch: Due to my job, I eat out a lot (carefully). This is where I get a lot of my calories. If not, I'm eating leftovers. Yesterday was leftovers and it was some home made jambalaya and another small steak.

Afternoon snack: Fruit and cheese again. Or maybe fruit and boiled egg. Sometimes it's a couple ounces of beef jerky

Dinner: Meat and veggies. However you get them is up to you. I'll dump lean chicken and some tofu in a pan with a hand full of snow peas and some broccoli and fry that up, or sometimes I actually cook real meals as evidenced by having leftover jambalaya yesterday for lunch.

Preworkout: shake made out of 1 cup yogurt, 1 scoop of whey protein, and a banana.

Post workout: Another banana and I've recently started taking a spoon of honey as well.

That'll get you up in the 2k calorie range pretty easily, though it could use a few more veggies.  I try to always get a serving or two of them at lunch. 

2500 isnt' that hard. Imagine if you try gaining weight -)

Nuts are your friend. So are other good fats. But honestly I'd have no problem hitting 2500 with just one snack of nuts.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for your input.

To T.K.: That's way different from how I currently eat. I definently need to look into whey protien, and probably need to get a blender. I also don't eat much yogurt, though I do like it.. Also, are you on a low carb diet or something? I haven't really broke it down on the tool where I count... But my head is saying that'd end fairly high fat and protien, and fairly low carb.

To Zeke: I use nuts to make up the majority of my fat most days already, though those are extremely dense with fat... I try not to eat much of them. 500 Cals of them max.. But that's only if i'm doing everything else low fat at the same time lol

Its just me being timid about food all together now, I usually think of the bad sides of all food before the benifits. Lately I've been eating healthy Breakfast (2 bowls of cereal with lowfat milk), Snacks (Nuts, fruits, Veggies), and Dinner (Boneless skinless chicken most times, with spinach).. but been ignoring lunch to an extent.

Here is my analysis from yesterday:

Fat - 9.5% (24 grams)
Protein - 40.3% (233 grams)
Carbohydrates - 47.9% (277 grams)
Alcohol - 0.0%
Other - 2.3%

 

Today's looks similar, but isn't done yet. So no, I'm not deliberately doing a low carb diet, I AM deliberately trying to get high protein. 

I have no problem getting well over 2K a day and for the most part its healthy stuff. Peanut butter sandwiches are a must for me. I use 4 tbsp so thats close to 400 cals alone not counting the bread.

I also do oatmeal and add milled flax seed and cook it with skim milk instead of water so that's 300 cals plus for breakfast.

Dinner is low fat meat (usually chicken or turkey) and salads and veggies. I also have a large salad for lunch.

Snacks are usually fruit and sometimes protein bars. I like the luna bars and pria bars.

I will also have plain honey nut cheerios out of the box for a late night snack or air poppped popcorn with salt substitute.

Nuts are very good for high cal and protein. Just don't get the salted kind -- get fresh nuts. I like almonds and pecans. I also like dried pumpkin seeds and now is the time of year you can make your own -- good fats there too.

I hate yogurt - I find I get well over the "5 a day" serving for fruit and veggies -- heck my salads alone are well over 5 cups -- I usually mix fresh spinach iceberg lettuce and spring mix together.  

Any whole grain pasta is going to have good calories.