Weekly menu: seven days step by step

The first meal is protein and fat: eggs, an omelet with cheese, fish, avocado. The second is a large 300 g bowl of green salad with olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and salt, alongside meat or fish. The third has the same composition but is lighter in volume.

Example schedule: 10:00, 13:00, 18:00. Between meals, water, tea, and coffee without sugar—nothing else.

If you do not need the third meal, you can skip it. But only if for several days in a row you have no weakness, no thoughts of food, and no urge to overeat in the evening.

What takes time on weekdays is the protein and the dressing.

On the weekend, it is convenient to roast two or three kinds of meat and fish at once—for four or five meals. Boil a dozen eggs. Mix a jar of dressing: olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt, and mustard without sugar.

Do not prepare the herbs in advance: they bruise. Wash and chop them on the day, which takes two minutes.

With this preparation, assembling a meal takes five minutes: take out the protein, chop the salad, and pour over the dressing.

Change not the dishes, but three things: the protein, the cooking method, and the dressing.

The same salad with olive oil and with a mustard-based dressing tastes like two different dishes. The same chicken, roasted and fried, is perceived differently. Changing these three variables gives you more options than searching for new recipes.

The second option is spices. They contain no carbohydrates if they are pure spices rather than ready-made blends with sugar and starch.

The menu stays within 50-70 g of carbohydrates per day because all the vegetables in it grow above ground, while bread, grains, and potatoes are completely absent.

You do not need to count every day. Calculate one day from the table once—that is enough to see the scale and then estimate by eye.

The menu is intended for a healthy adult. During pregnancy and breastfeeding, do not start this regimen on your own: the ADA specifies a minimum of 175 g of carbohydrates per day for pregnant women.

With type 1 diabetes and with type 2 diabetes treated with insulin or medications that carry a risk of hypoglycemia, changing the eating regimen requires dose adjustment by a doctor. With chronic kidney disease, the doctor determines the amount of protein in the menu.

Prepare a common base and separate only the side dish.

Everyone eats meat, fish, vegetables, and salad. The difference appears at one step: the family gets grains, potatoes, or bread, while you get a second portion of vegetables.

This removes the main problem in family kitchens: you do not need to cook two lunches or persuade the rest of the household to eat differently.

You can, and for most people it is easier that way. A menu of three repeating days is no worse than seven different ones if it is nutritionally complete.

The only thing that must be included in the week is fatty fish several times and different types of protein. Everything else can be repeated as often as you like.

The cheapest way to change the flavor is with dressing and spices, not new dishes.

Remove the evening meal, not the first one.

With two meals, the day looks like this: a complete first meal at the beginning of the window and the main meal in the middle. Both should be larger than with three meals; otherwise hunger will build up by evening.

Switching to two meals makes sense only when the third meal is genuinely unnecessary for several days in a row: there is no weakness, no preoccupation with food, and no urge to overeat in the evening. Do not deliberately cut back “for speed.”

It is counted not by days but by meals. Three meals over seven days means twenty-one portions of protein, some of which are covered by eggs and cottage cheese.

A practical calculation for one person: one and a half to two kilograms of meat and poultry, three to four portions of fatty fish, and twenty to thirty eggs. Vegetables and herbs: up to 300 grams of salad per day, plus vegetables with every hot meal.

If you eat twice, multiply by fourteen instead of twenty-one, but make each portion larger. The total amount of food for the week remains almost unchanged—the only change is how many parts it is divided into.

Don’t move anything around or try to make up for it. The weekly menu is a guide, not a schedule you cannot deviate from.

Missed a meal because of work? Have the next one as usual, without increasing it “to make up for the missed meal.” Ate something off-plan while visiting friends? Tomorrow’s plan stays the same. Didn’t have time to prepare what was listed in the table? Choose any other row from the same week.

The only thing to maintain when the day falls apart is a protein serving at every meal and no snacks between them. Everything else is flexible.

By the end of the first week, judge it by three signs, and weight is not the first among them.

You don’t feel drawn to the fridge between meals. In the evening, you don’t crave “something.” You wake up in the morning without intense hunger.

If at least one of the three signs is missing, the problem is almost always portion size: the meals are too small. Fix this by increasing lunch, not by making dinner stricter.

The second signal to watch is how much time you spend cooking. If it takes more than an hour a day, the menu will not last even a month, no matter how sound it is. In that case, rebuild the week around meal prep: protein in batches on the weekend, vegetables each day.