How To Make Your Own Meal Plan
What’s that old proverb about teaching one to fish?
Making my “Proatmeal” that is a part of my library of high protein meals that are nutritous and easy to prepare.
Meal plans — the fucking bane of nutrition coaching. I can’t count the amount of times a client has asked me for a meal plan in my time being a personal trainer. Luckily, I can deflect to the authorities on this one.
In case you didn’t know, only a registered dietician can prescribe you a specific meal plan.
Not only can I not make plans, I don’t often think of them as a highly useful tool in the longterm. As the proverb goes:
“Give a Man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a Man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
This is the specific crux of the meal plan. You are simply given a meal plan. You are given instructions to enact. You aren’t taught skills that are portable beyond the confines of that meal plan. While teaching someone about calories, energy balance, macronutrients, micronutrients, energy density, eating pace, meal preparation, how to track food, eating habits, portion control etc. can leave them with the skills and knowledge to navigate our current food environment with much more confidence and savvy.
If that same person only knew how to follow the exact script of their meal plan, any time they found themselves unable to follow that plan, they’ll be more likely to simply regress to their mean. Their pre meal plan mean, too. Which, if they felt like they needed a meal plan in the first place, probably was not ideal.
Are meal plans to be judged in a dichotomous way? Do we either follow them strictly or never even consider them? I don’t think so. I think like most things — there is a spectrum at play here.
There are plenty of useful and positive attributes to a meal plan:
-They require focus and intention with grocery shopping and food preparation.
-They eliminate excessive decision making around food. Potentially even reducing overall food focus.
-They can simplify your diet.
-They can reduce the total amount of variables in your diet. Making it easier to troubleshoot issues and adjust overall intake if weight management is a problem.
These are all positives. While also acknowledging the biggest problem — the lack of self efficacy it promotes.
There is a compromise between the two. Which is what I will attempt to help you with in this article. The compromise of being taught how to make your own meal plan. The combination of structured planning and self efficacy.
In general, I don’t recommend a meal plan you write for yourself to be rigid. This is also one of the issues of a prescribed meal plan. Unless you have ongoing collaboration with the RD that gave it to you, you may feel rigidly stuck within the boundaries of that plan. If you learn how to make your own, you can continuously add more meals and recipes into your rotations. This way you don’t get bored and you also continue to expand your food knowledge and application.
So let’s get started
Step 1: Understand Energy Balance
This will be a simplified breakdown of energy balance. I could write a separate article on energy balance, but this is meant to be practical.
Energy balance is simply the relationship between energy in and energy out. We measure food’s energy content with calories. Calories are simply a measuring tool for energy. Similar to how miles are a measuring tool for distance.
If you are in a positive energy balance, meaning you took in more energy than your expelled, you will gain body mass. If you are in a negative energy balance (the opposite) then you will lose body mass. This is very simple in theory — it just does get more complicated in the real world.
The first thing, is to aim for an energy balance that supports your goal. If you want to maintain your weight, then you are aiming for a neutral energy balance. Aiming for weight loss = negative energy balance and aiming for weight gain = positive energy balance. Simple enough.
The first thing you’ll want to know is what your maintenance calories are. That way you can adjust your diet in the direction you want. My preferred way of doing this is by tracking intake over two weeks while you are weight stable (meaning you haven’t been losing weight/gaining weight for a period of time). The reason I like this way, is because it will be specific to you. Also because tracking intake has an inherent inaccuracy that comes with it, but if you’ve been maintaining, it doesn’t really matter if you’re off because well, the proof of your current diet is one that yields weight maintenance. So as long as your inaccuracies are consistent, we still have a baseline to work from.
How you can track your current maintence this way is by tracking your food intake and daily morning weight for a minimum of two weeks straight. If you go for longer, that is even better (to a certain degree of course). From there you would calculate your weekly average weight and weekly average calorie intake. If your weight remained stable — small fluctuations are to be expected, then we have a reliable calorie maintenance.
Example:
You can see minimal changes in body weight averages two weeks of similar calorie intakes. Showing this person’s maintenance calories are around 2250 calories per day.
This would be two weeks of data on to calculate your own maintenance. You can see this individual is weight stable. In fact, remarkably weight stable. You would expect more fluctuations than this normal, but this is still realistic. You can also see their daily calorie intake is consistent too. Each day has more variability, but the weekly averages are similar. This would be evidence that this individual’s calorie maintenance would be about 2200–2300 range. Depending on if they maintained a similar amount of activity that they did in the two weeks of this data collection.
You can also go off of estimations. Calorie calculators are common on the internet, but they are estimates can be quite off. This doesn’t mean they don’t have utility. It just means they should not be taken as the inherent reality of your metabolism. You can use https://tdeecalculator.net as a standard basic calorie calculator. Or you can use one that I got from “The Muscle & Strength Pyramid: Nutrition” By Dr. Eric Helms. I like it for it’s simplicity.
The baseline multiplier he uses is simply bodyweight multiplied by 10. So using the example above would be 1765 calories at baseline for that individual.
Then you can add in an activity multiplier depending on how much your train and how active you are. I like this model because it’s more accurate for the population that I work with, since I’m a personal trainer and have my clients strength training regularly.
The 0.3 range in each category can be dependent on amount of workouts. If you are sedentary and train three times per week, then go for 1.3. Four times? Go for 1.4. I think you get the point.
adapted from “The Muscle & Strength Pyramid: Nutrition” By Dr. Eric Helms
The way I would differentiate between activity outside of training would be what your job is and how your leisure time is spent. If you work a manual labour job and strength train, you’ll most likely fall in the very active category. I you have a desk job but get a few little walks in per day, then you’re more like lightly active. If your only meaningful activity is working out, you’re probably best suited for the sedentary multiplier.
This is again is a generalized estimator. In my experience, tracking for a couple weeks is better and more specific to you. With that being said, you can opt for either strategy to figure out maintenance calories.
Finally, if a calculator spits out your intake recommendations, you still want to track your body weight data to validate it. Say it says you’ll maintain on 2000 calories. So you eat an average of 2000 calories for a month, if there is a weight trend up or down, it’s safe to say 2000 is not your maintenance. Hammering home the point that you need to track trends to get valuable data for you.
Step 2: Set Your Protein Target
Next up, we need to figure out your protein targets. I prioritize protein over other macronutrients because it’s often under-consumed in the context of optimizing body composition and it takes more effort to ensure adequate protein intake compared to the ease you can intake other macronutrients like carbs and fats.
If you want to read more about why protein is so crucial for your fat loss goals, check out this article I wrote a while ago. In short, as long as calories and protein are controlled for, the remaining intake of being low fat/high carb or high fat/low carb seem to not matter too much with weight loss. So personal preference is more important here for creating your own diet.
For adults in Canada, the RDA/adequate intake is set at 0.36g per pound of bodyweight. This may be “adequate” but it’s surely not optimal — especially in the realm of optimizing fat loss or building muscle. For context, let’s use the person above with this suggestion. Someone weighing 176.5 pounds would eat 64 grams of protein following the RDA in Canada. This is most likely fine from a health perspective, but sure as hell ain’t from an increasing performance and body composition perspective.
This study from MacMaster University compared two groups of twenty overweight young men (BMI >25, average age of 23).
Both groups underwent a 4 week calorie restricted diet. Calories and training were controlled for. The main difference was one group ate 0.54 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight and the other group ate 1.1 grams per pound of body weight.
The high protein group (1.1 grams per pound of BW) lost significantly more body mass, body fat and actually gained lean mass while the lower protein group only maintained lean mass.
Which is just one study in a body of consistent evidence that gives the nod to protein being a pivotal component of maximizing fat loss on a diet while maintaining or even gaining lean mass. These folks gained muscle while calorically restricted in the study above, but they were mostly untrained so this is not surprising. More advanced trainees wouldn’t necessarily expect the same results.
With the evidence in mind the sliding scale I like to use is from 0.7–1.1 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight during weight loss. This is considered to be a scale for weight loss with elite athletes, but considering the study above used the high end of the scale on untrained folks (while in a rather large deficit), it seems to still benefit non athletic populations well too.
So if you have higher body, are in a smaller deficit or are training less (say 2–3 x per week), you may find yourself on the lower end of the spectrum.
If you are leaner and trying to lose more fat or are in a larger deficit/have a high training volume, you can gravitate to the higher end of this range.
Now a lot of this is also focused around fat loss. The main reason is because that is that’s what I assume will be the larger audience of people reading this article will want.
Also because protein intake does matter even more while you’re losing weight. So that you maintain muscle mass in the process. It also does matter with building muscle. Leaving the other option of maintenance. If you’re maintaining, you’ll be eating more calories than if you were in a deficit. Since calories are made up of macronutrients (carbs/fats/protein/alcohol), you will most likely end up on this scale anyways if you do make sure to eat enough protein.
So it’s hard to imagine being lower or higher than this scale if you do pay attention to eating high protein and/or are training often. If you’re at maintenance, this won’t matter as much, but I still generally recommend being on this scale.
Step 3: Understanding Tracking/Portions
Next thing to understand is how to track calories and follow basic portion control guides.
Tracking calories is often critiqued for how inaccurate it is. Which it is. One recent study even showed a group of 10 female registered dieticians were underreporting an of average 223 calories per day over a 7 day trial. This was not statistically meaningful, as the control group of non dieticians were significantly underreporting with an average of 429 calories per day. Which shows some evidence that food awareness can reduce tracking error, but probably still won’t eliminate it entirely.
Does this mean it’s useless? I don’t believe so. If anything that study above shows that it can definitely help. Tracking can bring more food awareness and can help you get better at the specific skill of tracking.
Now tracking calories has many different strategies at your disposal. I’ll focus on the most important one I think: weighing your food on a food scale.
Weighing your food on a scale is perhaps the most accurate way to go about this. Eyeballs are compromised by the humans that use them. While you can do your best to negotiate with a food scale, objective numbers are still objective numbers.
A handful of almonds will have a large variance of grams and calories. While 30 grams of almonds on a scale is still just 30 grams of almonds. There will be some differences in energy between any group of 30 grams of a given food. Just probably not a meaninguful one. While there can be meaningful differences of calories and portion sizes between two different handfuls.
Let’s look at the the potential difference bewteen a calorically dense food like olive oil.
There is a 6.75 gram difference between the two servings above. Yet, the calorie difference is 59 calories. Which may not seem like a lot, but if this happens several times throughout the day, it quickly adds up.
a 50% increase in weight of a food may not seem like an easy mistake, but with some foods like olive oil or any energy dense food, it’s an easy one to make with your eyes. It’s not an easy one to make with a food scale.
This will apply more to energy dense foods. Which are fat dense foods (since one gram of fat is over 2 times more energy dense than 1 gram of carb or protein), or hyper palatable foods. Which often are a mix of carbs and fat — you know the super delicious foods that we just can’t seem to moderate like cakes, cookies, pizza, chips etc. These are also more processed, which typically reduces water and fibre content. When a food has lower water and fibre, it often will have more calories per gram. Since water still holds weight but adds zero calories and fibre also adds weight but is said to be around 2 calories (or 10 kilojoules in that paper) and tends to help with overall fullness. So foods that have less water, less fibre will often be more calorically dense. If it’s also a mix of high carb/fat making it hyper palatable, we have a recipe for overconsumption in front of us. Making eyeballing energy dense, hyper-palatable foods a crucial issue in the strategy of tracking.
First step is to buy or have access to food scale. When preparing foods, you’ll want to use this to get an idea of your portion sizes. It’s never been easier due to tracking apps like MyFitnessPal, Chronometer, Carbon Diet Coach (paid sub) etc.
So when you weigh out 20 grams of almonds on the scale, you can easily put it into the app or even scan the barcode of the app with your smartphone and the nutrition facts may already be in the app, streamlining this even more.
Some caveats around weighing food:
It’s preferred to track dry/uncooked foods if you can.
Such as weighing out dry pasta before you cook it. This also applies to your meats as well. Water content can change drastically when cooking (especially for foods like rice that soak up the water). As I mentioned above, water will add weight but zero calories. If you can’t do this for reasons such as you eat dinner with your family, it’s not an issue to track foods when cooked. It’s just more important that whatever method you do, you do consisnetly. As we’ve discussed, tracking is inherently inaccurate. The goal is just to reduce that inaccuracy as much as possible and changing up tracking methods constantly will only add more variables to the equation.
2. Some foods are more important to weigh than others.
You honestly don’t need to chase down every gram of broccoli. If you are shredded and trying to get stage lean, thats a different story. For us everyday folks, grams of spinach don’t practically matter. Certain foods definitely do though. If I’m having chips as a snack, you bet your ass I’m weighing them out. My eyes will never not lie to me when it comes to a serving size of Miss Vickies. This rule matters more with more energy dense foods, but I still apply to most non leafy vegetables. Not only to control calories, but also to hit my protein targets. Especially if you’re used to eating low protein. Your eye’s serving size of chicken breast may be lower than it should be based on your targets.
3. When eating out, overestimate.
Honestly, if you’re eating out a lot, tracking is not a good idea. Eating most of your meals prepared by others makes tracking calories even more inaccurate. If this is you, you can skip ahead to the portion control guide we will get to. Reason is, you have no idea the serving sizes of foods when eating out. Sure, some steaks may have the OZ on the menu, but you’re blindfolded about the amount of butter they cook it in — which is very calorically dense. Restaurants care about your experience from a taste perspective. They don’t give a fuck about your macros and why should they? They want to provide you with an experience and they often do a hell of a job. This will just often clash with your fitness goals.
Now if you’ve realized tracking ain’t for you, thats okay. Calories don’t need to be tracked to be managed. So let’s discuss one other portion control guide and eating cues to help with your diet.
Portion Control Guide:
Equipment needed? Your hand.
This was popularized (to my knowledge) by precision nutrition — one of the worlds top resources for teaching people nutrition coaching.
This is a very simple picture from PN’s Instagram, but I will link the full article by them here.
From PN’s instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CLpOOqXhNkR/
As you can see, using this model does two things:
Hand size will often be relative to body size. Body size is a factor in energy requirements . So there is some very loose specificity to the individual here.
Sizes are pretty on par with energy density. You’ll see fat dense foods have the smallest serving size (thumb) and vegetables have the largest serving size (fist).
So with this framework, we can adjust the diet to meet your needs. This is also very generalized, so just be aware of that.
Most meals for most goals should start with two palm sized servings of a protein dense food.
This includes and is not limited to:
-Lean meats
-Lean fish
-Soy/tempeh/tofu (vegan)
-Seitan (vegan)
-Low fat dairy like greek yogurt
-Egg whites
-Protein powder (vegan or animal based)
Examples of some protein dense foods
Then from there we want to get in 1–2 fist sized servings of vegetables.
This includes and is not limited to:
-Broccoli
-Cauliflower
-Brussel sprouts
-Salads (no dressing)
-Cabbage
-Cucumbers
-Zucchini
Etc.
Everybody’s clear favourite: Veggies.
This won’t include vegetables like potatoes of all kind, beets and carrots since they are more calorie and carb dense than the foods above. They will be considered more carb dense.
Then you add in your carb and fat dense sources.
Carbs. The food I have to constantly remind everyone not to be afraid of.
Carbs would include but not be limited to:
-Fruits
-Root veggies
-Rice
-Beans/lentils (more of a combo of protein and carb)
-Bread
-Pasta
Etc.
Some delicious and nutritious fat dense foods.
Fats would lnclude but not be limited to:
-Nuts
-Seeds
-Nut butters
-Fatty meats/fish (more of a combo of protein and fat)
-Oils
-Butter
-Avacados
etc.
The carb and fat servings will be typically the most adjustable based on goals and activity. I do suggest you defer to the precision nutrition article above if that sounds like something you want to learn more about!
Now, let’s get to the final step.
Step 4: Let’s Make Some Recipes!
This is where the fun part begins. Once you know your calorie and protein targets, we can start to craft this meal plan.
One thing to remember, is that this is not a rigid meal plan. More so, it is as an ever evolving collection of recipes that you can make with your preferred foods, that meet your nutrition needs for your goals.
This is about you, if you haven’t noticed. The goal is for you to build the basic skills and knowledge to carry out these plans for success.
When it comes to crafting these meals, there is an easy hack you can use to save them in regards to tracking. Tracking can be a monotonous activity. Thankfully, you can save your meals into your tracking app (I’m using MacroFactor here) and just plug and play.
an example of three staple meals that I have saved in my MacroFactor app. Making it easy to just plug and play.
As you can see above, these are three meals I have most days. Weekdays for sure. My greek yogurt meal for breakfast, my protein-oatmeal (proatmeal) for second breakfast, yes, I have second breakfast and my chicken wrap with veggies for lunch.
These are meals I can prepare seamlessly and support my goals from an energy, nutrition and macronutrient standpoint.
These are also foods that are mandatory on my grocery list. Every Sunday when my partner and I head to the grocery store, I don’t even always write a list since I know to get these staple foods.
This is where you can start, by crafting some template meals you know you like. Most of us do eat similar meals on a day to day basis. They may change up, but it’s less common that someone has a robust, rotating menu. If this is you, I’m confused that you’d even be interested in an article about structuring your own meal plan.
Take the meals you commonly eat, and measure/portion them out. You may realize that the fat content is quite high, while the protein content is low. From there, we just need to reduce the fat serving and increase the protein serving. Same would go for if it were high carb and low protein.
This component can be quite eye opening. Every client I have ever introduced to tracking was surprised by how little protein they ate and how much overall calories they ate. Most diets, if unchecked will be higher in calories and lower in protein than we expect. This ain’t the end of the world. It’s just important to realize.
I think this is why you should start with your protein serving first when crafting these meals. If you need to eat 30-40 grams minimum per meal to hit your targets, you best start by setting up your protein servings first.
From there you can add in whatever other foods you enjoy to hit your overall calorie target of the meal.
Let’s use an example. We’ll start with breakfast.
A common and easy one is greek yogurt. It’s easy to prepare and high in protein. If you go with the 0% version, you’ll get the highest amount of protein per serving, so I usually suggest you start there.
350 grams of 0% greek yogurt (unsweetened) will be around 200 calories with 34 grams of fat, 12 grams of carbs and 0 grams of fat.
Then we can add in some fats, since we were missing them in the yogurt. Let’s add in some pumpkin seeds. These are high in fat and even have some extra protein in them. With 20 grams brining in about 113 calories, 6 grams of protein, 10 grams of fat and 2.9 grams of carbs.
Finally, we can add some carbs too. Fruit will go well with this and even sweeten it a bit while adding in fibre and more volume. Let’s add 150 grams of blueberries and 150 grams of banana. This will add 219 more calories with 1 more gram of fat, 56 grams of carbs and 2.7 grams of protein.
And voila! We have a highly nutritious, protein packed meal. One that would also take about 3 minutes to prepare.
As you can see, for 537 calories, we’re getting a lot of protein (41 grams), but we’re also getting a lot of food. With this meal actually weighing 620 grams. Which equals about 1.4 pounds. This is another thing to factor in. If you’re trying to be satiated, food volume matters. And whole foods often pack the most amount of volume per calorie.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat any processed foods, no foods are off limits. It’s just something to consider when making this plan for yourself. If you need a lot of volume to be full, more whole foods are a great idea.
So this is how you could configure a meal for yourself. The next process is just to add more meals in over time. I will share a screenshot the meals I have saved in MacroFactor.
This is an example of seven meals that I have saved in myfitnesspal that I can just plug and play.
This makes tracking super easy for me. It also leaves room for me not to track. If I eat my normal meals throughout the day and have 800 calories left for dinner, I know if I have a standard portioned out meal, I will probably be in my ballpark range. Which can be very useful for when I’m eating out or at a friends place. That’s where this flexibilty and mix of tracking and portable portion control strategies intersect. This is not meant to be a rigid meal plan where you have to track and prepare everything, always. It is meant to fit your life in a way that you can use it to create more awareness around food and become more skilled with your portion control and nutritional IQ.
This process will be a work in progress for you. Especially if you’re starting with lower food awareness. If that is you, I encourage you to fight any feeling of intimidation and not be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes will be made and this is how you’ll learn. The better you get at this, the higher nutrition IQ will become and the more self efficacy you will have around your nutrtition. This is not meant for you to become a nutrition expert. It’s meant for you to become skilled enough to navigate your diet with the confidence and flexibility needed to succeed while maintaining your sanity.
Here are some key takeaways in the recipe making process:
Start with your protein serving to hit your minimum target
Protein will commonly be a lacking macronutrient for us. Coupled with the fact it’s quite important for body composition and performance, we want to start here. This will also help you build your awareness around which foods are the most protein dense. Eggs are a great example here. If you look at the picture below, around 62% of the calories from eggs are from fat. Making them a fat dense food with protein. Not a protein dense food, even though they are commonly thought of as a high protein food. Egg whites are high protein, not whole eggs. This is just one example.
2. Add in your carb/fat dense sources next
You have the choice to decide how you want to balance this. You just want to aim to fit the meal within your calorie budget. So you can go higher carb/lower fat or higher fat/lower carb or just more balanced. This won’t matter too much in general, so preference matters more here! This will once again, add to your awareness around the energy and macronutrient composition of certain foods.
3. Have some fun with this!
This should not be some bland meal plan you hate. You get to make meals you like. Sure, the lower your calories are, the less fun you can have. But that does not mean it has to be miserable. I suggest you make meals that you actually enjoy and just tweak them to work within your targets.
4. Set yourself up for success.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. Make sure you have the foods needed for these meals on hand. They should be accessible and a part of your regular grocery list. As if you don’t have them in your home, these meals are just ideas. This is where you need to be consistent in getting the foods you need and making them ready to prepare!
5. Keep adding to the library!
I’m pretty boring and will have the meals above forever. I don’t suggest this for most people. Especially if your awareness is lower. Keep trying to add in new recipes over time. This will make you learn more about more foods and help keep you engaged and excited by your meals. This can look like adding in one or two more recipes in a month until you have a big library that you feel confident in.
6. Finally, stay flexible.
This is about the intersection of flexible dieting and effective planning. These meals can always be adjusted based on your goals (say reducing their sizes for weight loss or increasing for weight gain). You can keep tweaking and adding to existing meals. You can also scrap meals that ain’t doing it for you anymore. You also don’t have to be religious about this. Remember, you don’t have to only eat meals on this plan. These meals can just make up the skeleton of your typical diet, while you still go out with friends and make room for your life.
Summary
I understand this is a LOT of information. This is a guide to be used and referenced back to.
I do recommend you go in order ,though. Make sure you understand calories and protein on a basic level first. Then make sure to grasp portion control and how to track. Then start making your meals. That way you can make meals that work for your pallet and your goals.
This will be a learning process for you. Which is why I wanted to write this article. It is something that has worked well with some clients. So I wanted to give you the tools you would need to do this for yourself. Don’t be hard on yourself if you feel lost. The more you practice these skills and learn, the better you will get with it and you’ll be able to troubleshoot your own issues!
The focal point of this whole article is surrounding the old proverb around teaching one to fish or simply giving one a fish to eat.
If you’ve read this far, you’re at least interested in learning how to fish. Which I hope I have brought some insight into. Just like fishing, this will take some time and you may feel like it’s not getting anywhere. I promise you that is not the case though. The longer you do practice these skills and develop your awareness/understanding of food the easier your relationship with food will become. In essence, the more fish you will catch over time. Which is what this is all about.
Cheers.🍻
-Coach Dylan
References:
1.The Muscle & Strength Pyramid: Nutrition
https://muscleandstrengthpyramids.com
2. Why Protein Is Crucial For Your Fat Loss Goals
https://www.five-elements.ca/blog-2/why-protein-is-crucial-for-your-fat-loss-goals
3.Obesity Energetics: Body Weight Regulation and the Effects of Diet Composition
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5568065/
4. Dietary Reference Intakes (Gov of Canada)
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/food-nutrition/healthy-eating/dietary-reference-intakes/tables/reference-values-macronutrients-dietary-reference-intakes-tables-2005.html
5.Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/103/3/738/4564609
6.Protein Recommendations for Weight Loss in Elite Athletes: A Focus on Body Composition and Performance
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29182451/
7. Energy intake and energy expenditure: a controlled study comparing dietitians and non-dietitians
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12396160/
8. The Role of Fiber in Energy Balance
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6360548/
9. The best calorie control guide.
https://www.precisionnutrition.com/calorie-control-guide-infographic