A meal plan you will actually cook

Knowing your protein target and hitting it are entirely different problems, and only one of them is solved by a calculator.

Most nutrition features stop at the number. The gap between a number and a week of meals you actually cook is where every plan dies — usually in about a fortnight, when the recipes turn out to need a food processor you do not own and forty minutes you do not have.

Your daily calorie target comes from the Mifflin-St Jeor resting-energy equation and an activity multiplier, adjusted by the rate of weight change you have chosen, with a floor at 1.2× your resting requirement. Protein is anchored to bodyweight — higher in a deficit — fat is 25% of calories, carbohydrate fills the rest.

Then the plan gets built from a library of 188 meals, filtered by:

• the cooking equipment you actually own;
• the cooking difficulty you will actually attempt, from basic to gourmet;
• anything you have excluded — any meal containing an excluded ingredient is simply not shown;
• your nominated prep day, so batch-cookable meals are grouped onto it and cook-fresh meals land on the day they are eaten.

Out the other end: a week of meals, a prep-day cook list and a shopping list.