I’ve spent the last 10 years showing you the how, now I want to teach you the why. Learn more about macro-friendly cooking, get recipes not seen anywhere else, and so much more when you join 71,557+ others by entering your email below!
👨🍳 The MF Kitchen #30 - look at this (ridiculous)
When I say big, I mean BIG!
This recipe makes 3 giant bowls of one of my personal favorites, the Chicken Caesar Salad.
These Oreo Protein Whips are a perfect ‘pop-able’ size and great for anybody with a sweet tooth.
The recipe makes 10 so you can store some away for later!
Pepperoni Pizza Pockets 🍕
Macros for each Pizza Pocket:
102 Cals, 8g Carbs, 4g Fat, 8.5g Protein
Here’s the video and recipe:
👉 https://www.instagram.com/p/C5ToKgcRTZT/
Your once-a-quarter reminder that Country EDM is better than Country 🤷🏻♂️🤠
You might love this meal.
You might hate this meal.
Or you just might be in the middle and think it’s “aight.”
Regardless, it’s celebrating its 100th birthday and I personally really enjoy the meal so I am going to share more about it lol.
In the early 1920s, Italian-American restauranteur Caesar Cardini fled the US because of the restrictions from the prohibition era.
He found his new home in Tijuana, Mexico.
And on July 4th, 1924, he was short on supplies but needed to impress his guest so he quickly threw together a simple but now classic meal.
It was a flavorful mix of romaine lettuce, garlic, croutons, Parmesan cheese, boiled eggs, olive oil, and Worcestershire sauce.
This creation made on a whim was a hit and became known as the Caesar salad!
The addition of chicken came later as the dish spread globally making it more of a substantial meal.
And today it is known as a “healthy” meal when in reality, it’s a calorie bomb.
Not trying to shit on the Caesar salad, but the average Caesar salad when eating out is 1000+ calories.
And it’s pretty much all in the dressing.
At the top of this email, I shared my own chicken Caesar salad recipe that is delicious and MASSIVE.
Oh, and only 456 calories. Highly suggest giving it a try!
And I recently made a homemade chicken Caesar salad wrap as well.
I made a homemade protein wrap which made the big wrap only 320 calories with 46g protein!
Here’s the link to check that out:
👉 https://www.instagram.com/p/C9P9lX2ufIg/
All in all, happy 100th birthday to the Chicken Caesar Salad 🎉
Question from Paul (Huntington, NY) – “Hey Zach, I am getting towards the end of my cut for the summer! Your recipes have helped a ton (especially the pizza, fries, ice cream, pizookies) in me losing over 40lbs. Can’t thank you enough.
The thing I am struggling with is what to do after I reach my goal body fat percentage? How do I change my macros, training, cardio, etc? Thank you again and hope my question gets picked!”
Answer: It’s July! Which does mean many diets are coming to an end! You are not alone Paul.
Let me outline exactly how you should handle the post-diet transition to ensure you don’t ruin all your progress.
For context, I’ve maintained this level of body fat percentage for the past 3-4 years with very little effort.
I’ll be completely honest, “little effort” might be a stretch. It’s easy but hard at the same time (but does get MUCH easier over time). Let me explain. You’ve now reached your goal weight/body fat percentage. I group goal weight and body fat percentage together because if you lost weight, you’ve more than likely lost a bunch of body fat. And that means you have a lower percentage of your weight from body fat thus a lower body fat percentage. Hope that all makes sense. So to lose this weight/body fat, you’ve been in a caloric deficit for an extended period. Baseline 2 months all the way to 4-6 months. Could be longer. And now you’ve finally reached your goal! BUT here’s the tricky part that you have to be very careful with. It’s hard not to think of the end of your diet like an “exhale” (aka you get to eat whatever you want). You’ve been in a caloric deficit aka you’ve been eating fewer calories than you’ve been burning. This creates weight loss. Inputs and outputs. But now once you’ve reached your goal weight/body fat percentage, the weight loss can stop. So that means you can go to a maintenance phase of calories. That is as simple as adding 200-300 calories to your macros equally split between carbs and fats. |
Your weight might spike a little bit.
But that’s not body fat. Just water.
Water held by glycogen.
Which means more calories shuttled to your muscles.
Which means better performance in the gym.
Which means maybe you are burning even more calories from this extra boost of energy and thus you could add an extra 100 calories on top of what you added.
My point is (without making this toooo complicated) you get more calories but not a TON.
It can’t be an on-and-off switch completely.
It can be less “hard” but it still requires some attention to detail.
And you can slowly continue to add more calories over time as your body gets used to not being in the caloric deficit.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any follow-up questions about this.
If there is any food that is the epitome of serving sizes being DEPRESSING, it’s peanut butter.
I love me some PB but the serving size is TINY.
That’s why I am a big fan of using a food scale.
It doesn’t care about your feelings or how hungry you are lol.
It just tells you the grams and you have to deal with how depressing that is 😭
Some foods give you a lot of food volume.
A LOT do not (and peanut butter is one of those).
BUT I am here to be of service! I love me some PB so I am going to give you a protein peanut butter recipe that’s only 60 calories per 2 TBSP!
It’s super easy to make and here’s how you do.
- Add to a bowl:
- 45g Vanilla Whey/Casein Blend Protein Powder
- 30g Powdered Peanut Butter
- 3g-5g (depends on how sweet you want it) Zero-Cal Sweetener
- Pinch of Sea Salt
- Then slowly add a little bit of cold water and mix.
- Repeat this process till you have your desired consistency!
Since your protein powder does makeup over half of this recipe, a high-quality one is a MUST if you want this to taste amazing.
Highly suggest checking out Flex Brands (aka the company I created to make the best protein powders for recipes in the world).
“FDL” will save you 15%.
Issue #30 of the Macro-Friendly Kitchen in the books!
Crazy there’s been 30 full emails like this.
I’ll be coming out with a way for you to see past issues soon enough.
That way you don’t miss out on anything 😎
Have a great week!
Much love and happy cooking,
Zach
I’ve spent the last 10 years showing you the how, now I want to teach you the why. Learn more about macro-friendly cooking, get recipes not seen anywhere else, and so much more when you join 71,557+ others by entering your email below!
