Getting Started

After posting this, I started to go about attempting to create a food list based on this idea.  It's a bit more complicated than I thought, but only because there really aren't any good tools for this out there.  Maybe I'll create one eventually.  Anyway, all the hard work is upfront, and once you have a general template with foods you like to eat, it would be easy to create variations.

I first started by determining that I want to eat 2000 calories a day.  Simply multiply by the number of days you want to do this for, in my case, seven.  So that's 14000 calories per week.  I decided I want to try to eat a 40/30/30% protein/carbs/fat ratio.  Nutrition labels break down information by calories, and grams ofprotein, carbs, and fat, so the next step is to figure out how many grams of each macronutrient you need.  There are 4 calories in a gram of protein or carbs, and 9 in a gram of fat.  So, I multiplied the percentage of the nutrient by the total calories I need to consume to get the amount of calories of that nutrient I need, and then divide by the calories per gram to get the grams I need to eat.  For fat, this was (30% * 14000 / 9) ~= 467g.  I determined I need to eat 1400g protein and 1050g carbs.

So now I knew what I need to eat.  The problem is figuring out what to eat.  The whole point of this is to be able to think generally, without specific recipes.  So I thought of some general things I enjoy- stir fries, grilled chicken, salads, turkey sandwiches, peanut butter english muffins, oatmeal, fruit, pasta, spicy rice and bean dishes.  It's definitely worth noting here that it's one thing to break up the nutrient balances you need.  It's another to make sure you're eating healthy food.  It's also worth noting that once you start actually looking at trying to meet a calorie goal with only healthy food, that it's actually pretty hard.  Natural foods simply aren't as calorie dense as processed foods.

In the end I decided to come up with some numbers for the foods I was thinking of based on my experiences of what I know I can handle.  For example, it might be tempting for me to say "i'm going to eat a pound of dried black beans this week", but the problem is, I know that's way too much for me to eat.  On the other hand, I could eat a salad at every meal practically.  I figured I'd create a spreadsheet and choose some numbers I thought were realistic about what I can handle eating.  I used LiveStrong.com's daily plate application to convert the standard servings you can look up into more sensible amounts.  For example, I typed in chicken breasts, and said I ate 5 pounds.  This gave me the calories and nutrient breakdown for the amount of chicken I'll try to eat in the week.

For my spreadsheet I made a google document spreadsheet.  I figured this way I can access and modify the sheet from anywhere.  Rather than explain the spreadsheet I've made it public.. check it out here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlRJ04-7e9HPdFh1OGxQY0RzQVFoNmFEN1BMVnVvMFE&hl=en_US#gid=0


It's still a work in progress, but as I have time I'll add more.