Add Before You Remove

How to eat like someone who trains — without a meal plan you’ll abandon by Thursday.

Add Before You Remove

First, the bit almost everyone gets wrong

You were probably told to start by cutting things out. No bread. No sugar. Nothing after eight. It holds for about nine days.

That isn’t a willpower problem. A plan built on removal gives you nothing to do — only a list of things to resist, every hour, forever. The first bad week takes the whole thing down, and then you are back where you started plus the feeling that you failed at it.

I start people the other way round. Get what your training actually needs onto the plate first. Most of what you were trying to cut falls away on its own, because you are no longer hungry enough to want it at nine at night.

What food is for, if you train

Three jobs, and it helps to know which one you are failing at.

The three jobs

Repair: Training is damage. The session is the request; the food and the sleep are what answer it. Train hard and eat badly and you collect the fatigue without the adaptation — which is what people mean when they say they have been going to the gym for six months and look the same.
Fuel: Enough energy to do the work in front of you. Under-fuel and the weights feel heavier than they are, your last two sets fall apart, and you will swear you are getting weaker. You are not. You are running the session on an empty tank.
Staying the course: The most underrated one. A way of eating you can hold for a year beats a perfect one you hold for a fortnight. Every time. Nobody has ever out-disciplined a plan they hated.

What is actually on the plate

Three things, and each one has a job. You do not need to count them — you do need to stop treating two of them as the enemy.

Protein, carbohydrate, fat

Protein — the repair material: This is the one almost everybody is short of. It is what your body rebuilds muscle from, and it keeps you full longer than anything else on the plate, which quietly solves a snacking problem you were otherwise going to have to fight.
Carbohydrate — the fuel: What powers hard sets. Cutting it is the most common self-inflicted wound in training: you remove the fuel, train worse, then conclude the programme is not working. If you train hard, you need it. Rice, potatoes, oats, bread, fruit.
Fat — the machinery: Hormones, joints, absorbing half your vitamins. Not the villain it was sold as in the nineties, but it is dense — easy to eat a lot of without noticing. Olive oil, nuts, eggs, oily fish, avocado.

Ten things, in the order I’d fix them

Do not do all of these at once. Take the first one, hold it for two weeks until it is boring, then add the next. That is slower than you want and faster than starting again in March.

Put protein in every meal

If you change one thing, change this. It is the single highest-return habit in here and it is the one most people are furthest from.

You do not need to weigh anything to start. A palm-sized portion at each meal is close enough, and you can see a palm without an app.

What a palm looks like

A chicken breast, a salmon fillet, a decent steak
Three or four eggs
A large tub of Greek yoghurt or cottage cheese
Two good handfuls of beans, lentils or chickpeas
A scoop of protein powder, if a meal is genuinely not happening

If you want the number

The range you will see quoted for people who train is roughly 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of bodyweight a day. Useful to know, not worth obsessing over. Hit the palm at each meal for a month and you will land close without ever opening a tracker.

The mistake I see most

Almost nobody I start with is eating badly. They are eating almost no protein before six in the evening, then trying to fit a day’s worth into dinner. Spread it out and everything else gets easier.

Stop skipping early and paying for it late

The classic pattern: coffee, nothing, something small at lunch, then a starving evening where you eat well past full and go to bed uncomfortable. Then you blame the evening.

The night is not the problem. The night is the bill for the day. Eat something real in the first few hours you are awake and the evening stops being a fight you have to win on willpower.

If mornings are hard

Do not force it. Move the meal to eleven. The goal is not breakfast at seven, it is closing the gap that runs from waking to dinner. And if the real obstacle is time, pick something you can eat with one hand — yoghurt, a couple of boiled eggs made the night before, a shake.

Get two fists of vegetables a day

Not for the reason you were told as a child. Fibre keeps digestion working, keeps you full on fewer calories, and does more for how you feel day to day than any supplement on the shelf behind the counter.

Two fists a day, minimum. Frozen counts. Tinned counts. It does not have to be fresh, organic, or interesting — it has to be eaten.

Easiest way in: add them to something you already cook rather than making a separate dish you will resent. A bag of frozen vegetables into the pan with whatever is already there takes ninety seconds.

Eat before you train, if you can

An hour or two before is ideal. Carbohydrate with a bit of protein, not much fat, nothing you have never tried before — the morning of a heavy session is a bad time to experiment.

If you have an hour or two

Oats with yoghurt and fruit
Toast and eggs
Rice and chicken
A sandwich, honestly

If you have ten minutes

A banana
Toast with honey or jam
A handful of dates

Training fasted is not dangerous and some people genuinely prefer it. Just know that if the last two sets feel like a different workout from the first two, this is usually why — and it is worth testing for a fortnight before deciding the programme is too hard.

Eat after, and stop worrying about the window

You were probably told you have thirty minutes after training or the session is wasted. You do not. That idea has been picked apart for years now. A proper meal within a couple of hours does the job comfortably.

Protein and carbohydrate, a normal amount, a normal meal. If a shake on the way home is what makes it actually happen, have the shake.

The window that matters is the day, not the half hour. Get enough across the whole day and the timing sorts itself out.

Drink more water than feels necessary

Dull advice, and the one that changes how a session feels fastest. A small drop in hydration shows up as heavy legs, an early headache, and a firm conviction that you are having an off day.

Carry a bottle you can actually see. Have a glass with every meal. Add some to what you drink during the session, especially in a Florida summer, and more again if you are sweating heavily or training outdoors.

If your urine is dark, you already have your answer and do not need an app to confirm it.

Plan only the meal you always get wrong

Nobody needs to meal-prep seven days. Almost everybody has one meal that reliably goes sideways — lunch at work, or dinner after a late finish when there is nothing in the fridge and the phone is already in your hand.

Fix that one. Cook it twice and take the second portion. Keep something in the freezer specifically for it. Or decide in advance what you order when you do order, so the decision is not made at nine o’clock on an empty stomach.

One solved meal beats a fridge full of containers you are bored of by Wednesday and throwing out on Friday.

Know which direction you are eating in

You cannot build muscle and strip fat at full speed at the same time. People spend years eating in the middle of those two and wondering why nothing moves.

Pick one for a block — two or three months — then reassess.

Building

Eat slightly more than you have been. Slightly. Most people hear "bulk" and add far more than they need, then spend the spring undoing it. Protein up, carbohydrate around training, and expect the scale to move slowly.

Leaning out

Eat slightly less, and keep protein high while you do — that is what protects the muscle you already built. Keep lifting heavy. The most common mistake is dropping the weights and adding cardio, which is how people end up lighter and softer.

Either direction: slow is not the compromise, slow is the strategy.

Be honest about alcohol

Not a lecture, and I am not going to tell you to stop. But it is worth knowing what it actually costs, because most people account for it as nothing.

It blunts recovery and the repair work your training just asked for
It wrecks sleep quality even when you sleep the hours
It carries energy your body uses first, before anything else on the plate
It makes the eating around it much worse — usually the bigger cost of the two

Two heavy nights a week will quietly undo four good sessions. If progress has stalled and everything else here is in place, this is usually the answer nobody wanted.

Aim for most days, not every day

If you eat the way you intended for most of the week, you are doing well. That is not a compromise or a consolation prize — it is the actual target.

The people who get somewhere are not the strictest. They are the ones who have a bad Saturday and carry on as normal on Sunday, instead of writing off the week and restarting on the first of the month. Nothing is ruined. Have the next meal as planned.

What a normal day looks like

Not a meal plan — a shape. Someone training four times a week, eating like a person rather than a spreadsheet.

The shape of it

Morning: Eggs on toast, or yoghurt with oats and fruit. Protein in it, not just coffee.
Midday: Chicken or fish, rice or potatoes, a fist of vegetables. The meal most people skip or make the worst version of.
Before training: A banana, or nothing if you ate an hour ago.
Evening: Whatever you actually cook at home, with a palm of protein and a fist of vegetables in it. Carbohydrate too if you trained.
If you are hungry between: Greek yoghurt, fruit, a handful of nuts, boiled eggs. Being hungry is information, not a test of character.

What I’d ignore

Six things you can stop worrying about

Eating after 8pm. Your body does not read a clock. What matters is the whole day, not the hour it arrived in.

Detoxes and cleanses. You have a liver and two kidneys doing this continuously, for free, and they are better at it than a juice.

Cutting carbohydrate to train harder. Carbohydrate is what fuels hard sets. Remove it, train worse, then blame the programme. I see this one constantly.

“Clean” and “dirty” food. Food is not moral. Some of it does more for you than the rest. That is the whole distinction, and the guilt attached to the other version helps nobody.

Most supplements. They are the last two percent and they cannot fix the first ninety. Get the meals in order first and then we can have the conversation.

Eating six small meals to “stoke your metabolism”. Three meals or five, whichever fits your day. The total is what counts.

One more thing, and it is not food

Sleep is the other half of recovery and it is the half nobody wants to hear about. Short sleep raises appetite, makes you reach for quicker energy, and blunts the adaptation the training was supposed to buy you.

If you are doing everything in this guide and progress has still stalled, look at how you are sleeping before you look at anything else on the list.

The whole thing on one page

If you print this, this is the bit worth putting on the fridge.

The checklist

Every meal: A palm of protein.
Every day: Two fists of vegetables. Water with every meal. Something real within a few hours of waking.
Around training: Carbohydrate before if you can. A proper meal within a couple of hours after.
Every week: One meal planned — the one that always goes wrong. Most days on plan, not every day.
Every few months: Decide which direction you are eating in, and give it a block before you judge it.
Never: Write off a week because of one bad day. Have the next meal as planned.

Two things worth knowing

This is general guidance, not a prescription. If you are managing a medical condition, taking medication that interacts with food, pregnant, or working with a dietitian, follow their advice over mine — they know things about you that I don’t.

And if your relationship with food is difficult, please talk to someone qualified in that specifically. It is a different problem from the one this guide solves, and it deserves better than a training article.

Not sure which one to start with?

Tell me what a normal day’s eating looks like for you and I’ll tell you which one of these seven would change the most. Costs nothing and takes me a minute.

Text me Or book a free 20-minute call

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