Nutrition
Most of the hard decisions happen in a restaurant, not in my kitchen. Lunch is eaten out five days a week for work. So this is an ordering playbook, not a meal plan.
N=1, not medical advice. This is one person’s log, tuned to one set of injuries and constraints. Nothing here is a recommendation.
Last updated . This page changes when something changes, not on a schedule.
The shape of a day
| When | What | Where |
|---|---|---|
| 07:00 | Coffee, black | Home |
| 07:30–08:30 | Training, fasted | Gym or studio |
| ~09:00 | Overnight oats, made the night before | Office |
| before 12:00 | Second and last coffee | Office |
| ~13:00 | Business lunch — a different dish every day | Restaurant |
| 15:00–17:00 | Fruit, nuts, or something dairy | Office |
| 18:30–20:00 | Cooked at home | Home |
Two fixed points and one variable. Breakfast is identical every single day, dinner is mine to control, and lunch is decided by a menu I didn’t write, in a room where I’m working. That asymmetry is what the rest of this page is about.
Breakfast, which never changes
The one meal that is the same every day, deliberately — it’s the only part of eating I want to stop thinking about. Assembled the night before:
- Rolled oats, 3 tbsp
- Chia seeds, 2 tbsp
- Peanut butter, 1 tbsp
- Hemp seeds, 2 tsp
- Flax seeds, 2 tsp
- Milk, enough to cover
Then in the morning, stirred in cold: a scoop of whey isolate and five grams of creatine. It lands around 35–40 g of protein and 14–18 g of fibre, which is more of both than most people manage before nine in the morning.
I’m aware of the contradiction — a page arguing that variety is the whole point, and then a breakfast that is the same 365 days a year. The resolution is that the variety has to go somewhere it’s worth having. Breakfast at 09:00 on a working morning isn’t it.
The restaurant playbook
By my estimate a restaurant meal runs 200–400 calories above the same dish cooked at home — more oil, more salt, sugar hiding in the sauce. Five lunches a week, that’s a meaningful number. None of the following is strange behaviour or slows a table down:
| Move | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Order the fish or the chicken | Protein-forward dishes carry less of the oil than the heavy red-meat plates. |
| Half the starch, extra vegetables | Kitchens do this without comment. It’s the single biggest lever on the plate. |
| Side salad as a starter | Arrives first, takes the edge off, and shifts the order in which you meet the carbohydrate. |
| Sauce on the side | You’ll use a third of it. That’s where the sugar and most of the fat are. |
| Skip the bread basket | The easiest cut on the whole table — nobody notices, and it’s eaten out of proximity rather than hunger. |
| No dessert at a business lunch | Save it for a moment you actually chose. |
| Ask for a full bottle of water | They forget to refill glasses. Having the bottle on the table is the difference between one glass and four. |
Together these pull a few hundred calories out of every lunch without a conversation about it, which matters when lunch is a work meeting.
Dinner
Roughly a third protein, a third carbohydrate, a third vegetables, eaten between half six and eight so there are a few hours before sleep. Protein rotates across seven or more sources — chicken, turkey, beef, pork, fish, eggs, lentils and beans, and the dairy end of things. Most people rotate two or three, and that variety is genuinely the strongest part of how I eat.
It’s also the meal with the most headroom, because it’s the one I fully control. Carbohydrate has already appeared at breakfast and lunch by that point, so trimming the starch at dinner and putting vegetables in its place is the obvious lever. I haven’t pulled it.
The arithmetic, which is the honest part
Every figure in this section is an estimate rather than a measurement — nothing here has been logged or weighed.
Breakfast around 500. Restaurant lunch around 800. Afternoon snack around 250. Dinner around 700. That’s roughly 2,250 before anything else — already close to where it needs to be for slow, steady progress.
Then there is dessert. Pastry, ice cream, something at the end of a meal, several times a week. Call it 350 calories a time, three or four times a week: an extra 1,000–1,400 a week, which averages out to 150–200 a day.
On those estimates real intake sits somewhere around 2,400–2,500 — at, or just above, maintenance.
Which is the whole answer. Training five mornings a week does not move body composition when intake sits at maintenance. It never has for anyone. The training is working; it just isn’t the variable in question, and no amount of adding sessions changes an equation that dessert is on the other side of.
The honest options are three, and only three. Cut dessert to once or twice a week and keep the three-month timeline. Keep eating it and move the timeline to six or twelve months. Or measure for a fortnight and find out whether “several times a week” means three or seven, because I genuinely don’t know.
What isn’t available is holding the goal and the habit at the same intensity and expecting both. That is where I have been for a while.
What I’m trying to eat more of
- Fatty fish — salmon, sardines, mackerel. Two or three times a week would do it; currently less.
- Cruciferous vegetables — broccoli, cauliflower, kale, sprouts. Rotated at dinner.
- Leafy greens — the potassium end of the plate, and the part most missing from a restaurant lunch.
- Berries — frozen is cheap and works fine.
- Legumes — already in the dinner rotation, worth keeping there.
What I avoid, and it’s mostly easy
- Coffee after midday — two cups, both before noon, no exceptions
- Sweetened drinks, juice, soft drinks — not a struggle, I don’t want them
- Alcohol — close to none, and not a discipline problem either
- Ultra-processed food, broadly
- Eating late — the gap before sleep matters more than I expected
Questions this page answers
How much does eating lunch out actually cost?
By my estimate a restaurant meal runs 200–400 calories above the same dish cooked at home — more oil, more salt, sugar hiding in the sauce. Over five lunches a week that is a meaningful number.
What can you order in a restaurant without making a scene?
Half the starch with extra vegetables is the single biggest lever, and kitchens do it without comment. Then: sauce on the side, side salad as a starter, skip the bread basket, and ask for a full bottle of water rather than waiting for a refill.
Does training five mornings a week make up for eating at maintenance?
No. Training five mornings a week does not move body composition when intake sits at maintenance, and it never has for anyone. The training is working; it just isn’t the variable in question.
Isn’t an identical breakfast every day a contradiction on a site about variety?
It is, and the resolution is that the variety has to go somewhere it is worth having. Breakfast at 09:00 on a working morning isn’t it — it is the one part of eating I want to stop thinking about.
What isn’t working
- Water, at about a litre a day. Should be two to three, training five times a week in a warm climate with coffee on top. Mild dehydration reads as hunger, which drives snacking that doesn’t satisfy, and it costs nothing to fix. A one-litre bottle on the desk, refilled once. This is the cheapest thing on the page and it is still not done.
- Dessert versus the stated goal. Covered above. The arithmetic is not ambiguous and I have been ambiguous about it for months.
- Vegetables at lunch are an afterthought. The restaurant plate is carbohydrate and protein with a garnish. That’s where the fibre gap lives.
- Nothing is measured. Every calorie figure on this page is an estimate, including the one I just built the whole argument on. Two weeks of actually logging would replace the argument with a fact, and I’d rather have the fact.