Nutrition Q&A... How I'm hitting 2,800 calories a day, pre-training meal & more!

Today we're doing part 2 of our Q&A from our IG followers, answering all of the nutrition questions that came through 😍
Including...
🥙 How I'm hitting 2,800 calories a day
🥑 How I adjust my days from my deficit intake compared to my surplus
🏋🏽‍♀️ Pre-training nutrition... My go-to options, and would I still eat a pre-training meal if I wasn't hungry?!

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DISCLAIMER
The Eat Like Ruby podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or dietary advice.
The advice given in this episode is general in nature and should not be used to treat any medical conditions, health conditions, illnesses, injuries and/or any nutrition related conditions, deficiencies or similar.
This podcast is not to be used as, or in place of, medical advice or dietary advice.
Please consult your health care professional before implementing any of the advice, information or protocols discussed in this episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

G'day gals, welcome back to the pod. Today I am doing part two of our QA all about my muscle gain phase. Like I said at the start of the last QA episode, even if you're not interested in muscle gain phase, we're basically just talking about nutrition and training and kind of what it looks like for me during this phase. So I think there's still some cool shit here, even if you don't have this goal or have a huge interest in doing the muscle gain phase, calorie surplus, etc. If you have any sort of interest in nutrition training, body comp and all of that, you'll probably get something out of these episodes. With the last one, like I said, this is part two. So with the last one, part one, we focus predominantly on training and answered all the training questions. Today we're gonna look a little bit more at the nutrition questions. And like always, there's probably gonna be a bit of crossover between the two, but I would definitely go back and listen to that last one if you haven't, just because this one's gonna flow straight on from it. So the very first question, we get these questions off Insta, so we chuck the QA box up on the Insta stories. And these are the questions. First one was what's on your big dog playlist when you train? I don't feel like it would make for a good podcast if I just sat here and listed a bunch of songs. So I will set a reminder to maybe share my playlist on my Instagram story or something like that. So moving on to the second question. Macro ranges, question mark, and fave pre-workout meal. I don't really aim for macro rangers, I aim for overall cals, which for me is around 2,800 at the moment. I've spoken in recent episodes about the fact that I have a bit of wiggle room on this. So sometimes I might be closer to two and a half, other days I might be up around the 3,000, but always coming back to an average intake around 2,800 cal. And then for my actual macros, I pretty much just make sure I get enough protein. So for me, that's around the 130-ish grams. My protein usually falls between 120 and 140, so that's perfect. I like to make sure I get enough dietary fat, but when you're eating 2800 calves, it'd be pretty weird if you were not getting enough dietary fat. Quote, enough dietary fat for someone of my size is around 40 grams. I literally get about 90 a day. So we're all good there. And then the rest of my cows just come from carbs. My carbs are pretty much falling around like the 350 to 400 range because I just have a bit of wiggle room with all those numbers every day. So I might have a day where protein's like down at 120, fats are a little bit lower, maybe 70s, and then the carbs are up around 400, or a day where the fats are up at 90, and then therefore the carbs are a little bit lower. I don't actually look at these at all. I actually don't look at these ever because I know just based off my food choices, I know I get enough protein. I've pretty much got my protein from the same foods for the last 15 years. Like, this just hasn't changed. I'm very much a routine person. I repeat a lot of the same meals, and then I mix them up over time just with little tweaks. But every day I have a serve of yogurt in a meal that ends up being about 20 something grams of protein. I have a serve of eggs in a meal that ends up being about 20, probably usually closer to 30 grams of protein. Then I have a serve of meat with my dinner, and that meal is usually around like 40 grams of protein, and then I have a protein shake every day, which is usually 30 to 40 grams. So if we look at that right there, that's how I get up towards that 120 mark. And then obviously all the other little foods that I have throughout the day can just contribute to protein in small amounts, and that's what is the deciding factor of whether it's like 120 or 140. So I don't ever actually look at it because I know I'm gonna hit it. And then, like I said, with my dietary fat, I know that I'm going well above my minimum requirement of dietary fat, so I don't ever look at that. And then I just make sure I come in close to my overall calcials so I'm not under consuming. And I've spoken on the podcast before, I'm more mindful about things like servings of fruit, veggies, iron, calcium, etc. But again, I'm such a routine person with the foods that work towards all those things, so I don't have to really sit there and like nitpick the numbers or wonder if I've hit them. I can look at my day very quickly and be like, yeah, I've ticked all the boxes I want to tick. Moving on. So don't really aim for macro ranges. Sorry if that's not the answer that you wanted to hear. And then fave pre-workout meal was in the same question. If I'm training legs, I've developed this habit of when I'm training legs, I have two full bagels, so like four halves, covered in jam. It's like 120 grams of carbs in that meal. And my deal with myself is like you can have that before you train legs, but then you have to absolutely send it in the leg session. And that's been going well. I've been living up to my end of the bargain with that one. I'm very mindful that if or when I drop my calories, that's going to be a massive hit to my system to take out that pre-training meal, but I'm enjoying it while it's there. And then for my upper body days, I pretty much have the same thing, but I just reduce the overall serving size. I don't train upper body anywhere near as hard as I train lower body. So yeah, I pretty much just go with two pieces of toast and jam for the upper body session. And I just really like both of those. I have a massive sweet tooth, so I love anything with jam. They sit really well with me. I love having that massive bagel meal and then just going and sending it in a leg sesh. I just feel like it goes so well. And yeah, it's really just working for me. So it's very much, it ain't broke. I'm not gonna fix it, I'm not gonna mix it up. That's where my mindset is at with that at the moment. The next question is any favorite meals to eat during your muscle gain phase? I feel like I'm the most boring person on 2,800 calories. I feel like this answer is not gonna be what anyone wants to hear. When you hear about someone eating 2,800 cows, you picture all of these foods, and I literally just eat the same foods I eat when I'm on like 1600 cows. I just ramp up the servings. And if we skip ahead for a second, we had a question here as well that just says, what does a day on the plate look like? So I thought maybe I could answer these together because when the person asks any favorite meals to eat during the muscle gain phase, I just eat all of my usual meals. Like I don't, I literally cannot be bothered. I cannot be bothered sitting there going, I have all these calories to play with, what do I want to have? I don't eat 2,800 calories for that reason. I do it because I know that it's the best amount to support the goal that I have. So it's awesome. I love it, but I'm not sitting there like, oh my god, I'm so amped to eat 2,800 calves. What should I have? What should I plan? How can I spend these? I'm the least creative person with nutrition. I just cannot be bothered. I don't know if it's because I run a company, which is very exhausting, and or because that company requires me to help so many other people with their nutrition every day. It's like when you talk to hairdressers and they're like, Yeah, I do other people's hair all day and I can't be bothered doing mine, or personal trainers that train people all day and then when they finish work, they're like, I'm not training, I'm getting the hell out of here. I feel like there's an element there for me where when I finish work, the last thing I want to do is sit there and play macro Tetris to create a bunch of brand new meals. Like I just cannot be bothered. So I'm just like, oh yeah, we'll just have our usual dinners, get on with it. And then it always clocks in my mind, like I think to myself, you're going to drop your cows eventually one day, and then just be like, wow, I should have enjoyed those 2800 cows more. I should have made better use of it. I should have been more creative. But right now I honestly just can't be bothered. So if we come to that next question of what does a day on a plate look like, anyone who's a long-term listener of the pod who's ever heard me talk about a day on a plate, you're gonna hear the same shit right now that you've heard before, just slightly bigger portions. So I have my Eat Lac Ruby bowl every day. If you don't know, it's yogurt, it's fruit, Nutella, cereal. When I do this and I'm on higher cals, I go for a higher cal yogurt. So I don't do like the high protein, low calorie yogurts. I piss them right off and I have like those juicy, fattier yogurts. They're so much nicer. People think those high protein yogurts are nice until you go back to normal yogurt and you're like, wow, I've been missing out. So I enjoy that. I have a big hefty scoop of Nutella. I literally have 45 grams of Nutella every day on this bowl. Nice big serve of cereal, nice big serve of fruit. Then for my pre-training, like we just said, I'll either have the two bagels or I'll have toast. This is kind of one of the factors that then decides whether my day is like up towards those high 2,000, maybe 3,000 cows, or if I have that smaller pre-training meal and then all the rest of my food for the day is the same. Obviously, it's a little bit smaller and the day is more like two five or two six with the cows. So that's just a cool example of like the flexibility I'm having there. Still ticking all the same boxes, still doing all the same shit, but just the portions and the food choices then just add up a little bit differently. So pre-training is either two bagels or two pieces of toast. Post-training, I always have a protein shake without fail. At the moment, I've been having a banana as well, just a little bit of extra carbs after the sesh. Then I usually have my egg meal at some point in the afternoon. So I have three eggs, three pieces of toast. And this is something that I'll have a bit of like flexibility with, if you will, where I'm like, oh, do I want avocado? Do I want veggies with it? Do I want olive oil? Do I want kimchi? Like I just mix up the little extras, but the bulk of the meal is the same all the time. Same with the like Ruby Bowl. Like I mixed up my cereals, I mix up the flavors of my yogurt, I mix up my fruits, but I know every day I'm gonna have some variation of that meal. And then coming back to having my egg meal, which is usually like early Avo, then I'll have some sort of snack maybe around four o'clock. This I mix up. So when it was Easter, this is when I was having like hot crust buns and Easter eggs. Now I'm just having a few rows of dark chocolate in the afternoon. So I just mix that up, and that is pretty much just to get calories in. If we think about that meal, like if I'm having hot crust buns and Easter eggs, I'm not ticking any boxes there. The only box I'm ticking is making sure I hit my cows. But then if we look at all my other meals, I tick a lot of the boxes I need to tick with protein, nutrients, etc. And then that meal is literally just a snack to get some extra cows in, and then I just come in to dinner. So, dinners, we just do some sort of protein and veggie combo. This can be literally anything from like taco balls to steaks, buds, and veg. Um, we were doing burritos and tacos last week. We do like different stir fries, homemade pizzas we did a few weeks ago, but we're always just mindful of like this is where we get the bulk of our veg for the day, big hit of protein, always have meat with this meal. And then just depending on what that meal actually is for that week or for that night, we might get some whole grains or some calcium or whatever else with it as well. And that's pretty much my day. And it's so funny when people think about 2800 calves, they pit just so much food. And anytime we put people up in the 2000 calorie range, it's so common for people to say to me, like, oh my god, I can't eat that much. If people look at my day on a plate, and if you go to my Instagram right now, I might reshare it when this episode comes out. But we I did a day on a plate when I first started the muscle game phase, 2,800 cal. I also have a coffee as well. I forgot to mention that in there. But if you go and look at this day, it's not a crazy amount of food. Like it's absolutely not, but it's just ramping up the portions, like I said, with things like Nutella, Easter eggs, etc. That's where the calories come from. So I just keep all of those meals the same, regardless of whether I'm in a deficit or maintenance or a surplus. But then I just adjust the portions. Some of the individual ingredients will come out if it's a deficit or ramp them up if it's a surplus. But I'm always having that eat lacquer bowl. I always have some sort of egg meal, always have meat and veg. I always have a protein shake. I always have pre-training. So anytime I factor in all of those things, then I'm just like, okay, cool. Now looking at my current goal, which at the moment is obviously muscle gain and the surplus, I need to crank the portions of all those things up to get the cows up. And then I just have a look where that leaves me in terms of do I bring in an afternoon snack? Yes, I do. And how many cows should that be to fill out the day in the way I need to fill it out to hit the target that I want to hit? So it's really not that exciting, but again, I don't do it for the excitement. I don't do it to have all these creative, fun calories. I do it because I want to hit that intake to build my physique. So I just come back to what's the easiest way I can do this? Because like I said, I work all day, I do so much. The last thing I want to do is sit there at night and Google recipes and try and make them fit my day. No, thank you. And now I've just looked ahead at the next question, which I feel like I pretty much just answered. Somebody said, Having the extra calories in your muscle gain phase, where do you place them in your day? So I literally think I just answered that. I go through all my normal meals, I crank up the portions, I have a look at things like do we ditch the low calorie yogurt and bring in a higher calorie one? I do a similar thing with cereal, I crank up the portions of my dinner. If I was in a deficit, I'd probably just do like steak and veg, no spuds or rice or whatever. And then when I'm in the surplus, it's like, yep, let's bring some extra carbs into the dinner. I look at that afternoon snack. If I was to go into a deficit, probably the first thing I do would just be ditch that afternoon snack and eat half the amount of Nutella that I'm eating. And then I'd go through and make a few other changes. But it's just little things like that that I just crank up or bring in to get that overall intake up. So I feel like that answers that question. And this is actually crazy. This is the last question, but I feel like I might spend a while on this one. But I feel like we whipped through those. Somebody asked, and I feel like any, I'm already laughing, any of our long-term listeners, anyone who knows me well, is gonna go, oh shit, here she goes. I can't even read this one out without laughing. Somebody asked, would you still eat a pre-workout snack if you weren't hungry? And the way I want to firstly answer this, if you know, you know, my instinct is to just say, never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever would I ever, ever, ever, even consider ever training without eating first. Never ever. If you didn't get that. I just wouldn't. It's just not an option to me. It would not cross my mind. Even I think I've said this on the podcast before, even if I was in a deficit and I had eaten all of my calories for the day, I would choose to go over my calories to eat a pre-training meal if I had to. I would absolutely always choose that. So then if we come back to this question of would you still eat a pre-workout snack if you weren't hungry? 150 million thousand percent yes. I cannot stress this one enough. And the first thing I want to point out here, I'm laughing and I'm taking the piss because this is probably my number one most passionate thing. And like I said, long-term listeners will know, I have been harping on about fueling training for a decade. So it literally would not cross my mind. It's not an option to me to not eat before training. And if we actually look at the question, I will answer it properly. If we look at this question of would you still eat a pre-workout snack if you weren't hungry, eating the pre-workout snack is nothing to do with hunger. So it wouldn't cross my mind to like I would never go, I'm not hungry, like maybe I shouldn't eat that, because it's just nothing to do with hunger. To me, the pre-workout snack is 100% about fueling the session. And especially looking at my goals right now, it is just an absolute no-brainer. I don't know if people can hear Nutella in the background, but he's going off. I've been recording for hours. He's over it. I think Nutella has been a feature of every episode this year. He's just really turning it on when the camera comes on. Nutella's my dog, if people don't know. But coming back to the question, what was I saying there? Good one, Nutella. If I look at my current training and more so my current goals, my goal is to gain muscle at the moment. So we know that muscle gain is optimized when sufficient training is in place. The body has enough energy to draw on aka enough calories to facilitate the muscle gain process, and when the body has enough protein. So if we look at those first two points, muscle gain is optimized when we're training hard enough and when we have enough available for the body to draw on when it goes through muscle protein synthesis. So to me, it's almost like a two-parter, like there's a double benefit to eating before training when you have this goal. And I just cannot stress enough, guys, especially if you're new here, no scenario exists where I'm telling a person not to eat before training. I think every single person should be eating before every single session. I will die on that hill. So coming back to this specific phase and goal for me, there really is the two benefits of if I want to train as hard as I possibly can. And I spoke about this in that last episode. Like, I am sending it in the gym right now. If I want to train to that level that is required to really optimize my training and my muscle growth, I want to make sure I've got the energy to do so. I absolutely hate experiencing hunger in the gym. And I know this person has said, like, would you still eat one if you weren't hungry? So that obviously strays from this point. But I absolutely hate feeling hungry in the gym. If I get hunger mid-sess, I'm just like, that makes me so mad, right? So I don't want to experience that, but I definitely want to make sure I've got enough energy available for my body to do the best training it can to push the best muscle gain that it can. And then I also then want to look at that second point of once I've done that training and my body's going through muscle protein synthesis, we know that it's going to draw on excess energy at that time. So again, I want to make sure that energy is there. So I would never just go, oh, I'm just not that hungry. So I don't need to eat. Because I'm like, no, but eating is absolutely going to optimize the things that you want and need to optimize right now for the goal that you have. So I just like literally wouldn't think about it. I would not ever think, oh, I'm going to gym soon. Am I hungry? Should I eat? My I'm just so hardwired to go, I'm going to gym soon. I have to eat. Like it's non-negotiable. So because it is so important to me and because it is such non-negotiable, I literally don't give it any thought. I definitely don't ever think about the hunger. Whether I'm hungry or not, whether I have hunger present or not, like it just literally doesn't cross my mind. It's just as simple as, I'm going to gym, I gotta have pre-training. That end. So I don't know if that answers the question. I guess it does because one, like I said, 150 million thousand percent or whatever I said before. Would you still eat a pre-workout snack if you weren't hungry? Yes, I would. Even if, like, even if I look at this actual scenario, if I was heading to the gym and I'm like, wow, I'm actually really not hungry right now. I still would be like, well, if you go in a gym, you're eating rubs. Like it's all or nothing. You're either going to gym and if you're going, you're having a pre-training meal, or you're not having that pre-training meal and therefore you're not going. It's like a little kid that can't have dessert until they've had the dinner. It's like you can't go and train until you've had that meal. Non-negotiable. That end. It's not up for debate. So, yes, I would still eat a pre-workout snack if I wasn't hungry. And that is literally all of our nutrition questions. I felt like there were so many more, but I feel like they were actually all really similar questions. So we kind of just covered it in the chat. So that is all from me today. I feel like that's actually nice and refreshing to do a little short episode for once. I'm sure I'll be back very soon with plenty more to say. I do have a fair few notes in my phone at the moment for some episodes, just things that have like come up with clients, some things that have come up with myself, bit of mindset, just some cool shit to look at. You guys know I have plenty more to say. So enjoy the short episode today because they are few and far between. I will be back very soon. Thank you so much.