As mentioned earlier in this blog under the chapter title “Starting Keto”, it’s important to establish a meal plan before the start date. A meal plan should not only consist of the right types of meals but also include the times you should eat those meals. There are two ways to go when creating meals for your meal plan: you can either do the hard work of macro and calorie calculation for each meal, which for some is fun and others torture, or you can choose pre-created meals where all the hard work is done for you. In the next chapter “Keto Meals”, we have done this for you; however, in this chapter we will also teach you how to calculate a keto meal for your meal plan.
STEP 1. MEAL IDEA
What I do when creating a keto meal plan is to write down all the meals I would like to eat on what days. Don’t worry if you are unsure if they are keto or not; over time you will become better at this. The main objective is to write down the meals you feel you would like to eat. Once you get to Stage 3, you will realise that they might not be keto and you can adjust them as you need.
A tip from me is, while starting out, try to only create one meal a day. It prevents it from becoming overwhelming, so either eat the same meal for lunch and dinner or supplement some meals with keto shakes.
STEP 2. KNOWING YOUR MACROS
Calculating your macros can be done two ways: simply using a macro calculator online, or working out your macros manually through your daily calories as follows:
- Divide your daily calories by your macro %. You need 70% fat, 25% protein and 5% carbs. The sum is: calories x .7 or calories x .25 or calories x .05. For example, if you are to have 1386 calories and 70% of those calories from fat, 25% from protein and 5% from carbs that would be 1386 x.7 = 970 calories from fat, 1386 x .25 = 346 calories from protein, and 1386 x .05 = 69 calories from carbohydrates.
- Divide your macro calories by grams. Now you know how many calories you should have for each macro, how do you work out how many grams you should be having? Well that’s the easier part of this process; all you need to do is divide those calories by how many calories are in each gram.
Remember we mentioned that fat has 9 calories per gram, protein has 4 and carbs has 4.
So for fat it would be 970 calories/9 = 107g of fat per day
For protein it would be 346 calories/4 = 86g of protein per day
For carbs it would be 69 calories/4 = 17g of carbs per day
We can see the easy part is using a macro calculator.
STEP 3. CONSTRUCTION
This is where you would pull out your phone to download a calorie counting app or visit a website. These services allow you to enter what type of foods you would like to eat and they tell you what macros and calories are in those foods.
Here is a list of macro and calorie counting apps I recommend. They all come in app form or have access via a website:
- Carb Manager
- MyFitnessPal
- Calorie King
From here you enter the ingredients you would like from each meal and adjust them until you get the desired macros that you have outlined earlier.
