The other day, I got really excited about the lunch I was preparing and thought it was “The perfect lunch” for weight loss.
I’ve been focusing on losing weight, so I’ve been really focused on every meal being “perfect” and healthy.
I got so excited about this meal that I pulled my phone out and was about to take photo of it so that I could share it with the members of Gage Strength Training, and inspire thousands of people in West Chester, PA looking to lose weight… But then I decided it would be better to calculate the exact nutrition of this meal to share as well.
Here’s what my lunch consisted of:
1 Wild Caught salmon burger (healthy fats + protein)
½ Cup Quinoa + brown Rice mix (carbs to fuel my workout later on)
A medium sized apple +exactly 2 tablespoons of peanut butter
2 Sous-Vid Egg Bites (more protein + fats)
…It didn’t even fill up a full plate, and covered pretty much everything I needed and EVERYTHING on this plate was very healthy!
Then I did the math…
The Egg bites were 290 calories
The salmon burger was 190
The apple was 90 + and peanut butter was 190
The Quinoa + Brown rice was another 240
…Totalling 1000 calories!
This perfect lunch turned out to hit half of my daily calories in ONE meal… This is NOT perfect for weight loss.
The moral of this story is this… Just because a meal consists of healthy foods, doesn’t make it align with your weight loss goal.
You’ll see this with giant salads, meals cooked with oils + butter that add up in calories, and Smoothies packed with more fruit than you need to eat in a week.
None of these foods are bad, but it’s the total calories that add up and don’t allow us to lose weight.
Without weighing, measuring and tracking these exact numbers I would eat this lunch every day and think the pounds should be falling off… But they wouldn’t, and I would be incredibly frustrated and think “I am eating so perfectly… There must be something wrong with me”
Or “I tried that diet, and it didn’t work”
…The numbers don’t lie and the truth is that we underestimate how much we eat everyday.
1. Get a food scale and weight everything you eat for the next week
2. Plug it into MyFitnessPal (our favorite calorie tracking app)
3. Track EVERYTHING you eat for 1 week, and see what you are actually eating!
Still not sure where to start? If you live in West Chester, PA you can set up a free meeting with me (Devin Gage) to learn what to eat in order to lose weight.
Just click here to schedule a free nutrition meeting.
PS. How do I fix this lunch to actually make it align with my goals?
I skipped the peanut butter on the Apple, and Skipped the eggs with my lunch and ate 2 salmon burgers instead. This cut about 300 calories off of my lunch, and made it fit into the rest of my day.
