Yours
Steady
Under 1,800 kcal a day
Smaller grain base, a little less protein. Most recipes still land above 35g of protein.
17 recipes you'll
actually want
to eat
your macros Tap to jump
Good Food
Good Work
17 recipes
Macros for your body
Brownies included
Before you start
Why any of this matters
Here is the thing nobody tells you at a wellness talk: the conditions that take up most of a life are mostly built, not caught.
Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, fatty liver. These are not bad luck. They are the slow result of a few ordinary habits repeated for a decade or two. Which is frustrating, and also the best news in this entire document, because a thing that gets built can be built differently.
I studied this properly. My degree in Sport Science and Health spent its last two years on exactly one question: how far can food and movement go as preventative medicine, and how does that work in a clinical setting. The honest answer is further than most people expect, and it does not require anything dramatic.
So this is not a diet. There is nothing here you have to cut out, and I have put brownies and burgers in the book on purpose. What I care about is that you learn a handful of things properly once, and still be doing them in twenty years. That is the whole point. When you learn, you learn for life.
01
Protein at every meal
The single highest-leverage change. It keeps you full, it protects muscle as you age, and muscle is one of the strongest predictors of how well you handle sugar. Aim for 25g to 40g a meal. Every recipe here tells you where it lands.
02
Eat food with fibre in it
Vegetables, beans, lentils, whole grains, fruit. Fibre slows the rise in blood sugar after you eat, feeds your gut bacteria, and lowers cholesterol. Most adults get about half of what they need. This is the quiet one nobody talks about.
03
Consistency beats intensity
Eating reasonably eighty per cent of the time for ten years will do more than eating perfectly for eight weeks. Nothing in this guide asks you to be perfect. It asks you to have something decent ready when Tuesday gets busy.
04
If you hate it you will stop
This is not a soft point, it is the whole mechanism. Food you actively enjoy is food you keep eating. That is why there is a burger, a brownie and a tray of blueberry bars in here. Restriction has a very poor twenty year track record.
What this looks like at work
Most workplace food advice quietly assumes you have a kitchen, a microwave queue of zero people, and an hour. You do not. So every lunch in this guide is built to be eaten cold, straight from the box. No reheating, no queue, no sad warmed-up pasta.
That constraint turned out to be a gift. Cold food forces you toward the things that are good for you anyway: grains and pulses that hold their texture, plenty of raw vegetables, dressings that improve overnight rather than collapse. A shawarma box on day two is genuinely better than it was on day one.
The rest of the recipes are for home, where the oven exists. Breakfasts you can make ahead, dinners worth cooking, and treats that mean you do not need to raid the vending machine at four o'clock.
Step one
Work out your numbers
Six questions, two minutes. This gives you a realistic daily calorie and protein target, then tells you which portion size to use in the recipes below, so the same seventeen recipes work whether you are 52kg or 95kg.
About you
Sex at birth
Height
Your goal
Your daily target
2,000kcal
Maintenance. Holding roughly where you are.
Protein122g
Carbs220g
Fat56g
Breakfast
500
Lunch
660
Dinner
640
Your portion size is Standard. Look for it on every recipe card below.
Step two
Your portion size
Every main recipe is written three ways. You do not cook anything different and you do not buy anything extra. You change the pasta, rice, oats or potato, and nudge the protein up or down. The vegetables stay exactly as written, always.
Yours
Standard
1,800 to 2,400 kcal a day
The recipe exactly as written on the card. This is where most people land.
Yours
Strong
Over 2,400 kcal a day
More grain, more protein. For bigger or more active bodies who would otherwise be starving by three.
Sweet treats have one size. A brownie is a brownie. They are portioned already, and that is deliberate.
Step three
The Sunday hour
You do not need to prep every meal for every day. That is how people burn out by week three. You need one hour that removes the two or three decisions most likely to go badly.
One hour on a Sunday buys back three things, and only one of them is time.
It saves you hours, not minutes
Cooking one batch of chicken takes the same twenty minutes as cooking one portion. Doing it once instead of four separate times is roughly three hours back across the week, and most of those are weekday evening hours, which are the expensive ones.
It is significantly cheaper
You buy a whole pack and use a whole pack, so nothing rots in the drawer. The average household throws away a serious share of the food it buys. Prep also removes the two most expensive habits there are: the desk-adjacent lunch bought in a hurry, and the seven o'clock delivery order.
It kills the six o'clock decision
You have made hundreds of decisions by the time you get home. Willpower is not a moral quality, it is a resource, and yours is spent. That is the moment the takeaway app wins, every time, no matter how motivated you were on Monday morning.
So you decide once, on a full tank
Sunday you is rested, not hungry and not annoyed. Let that version choose. Thursday you should not be making decisions about food at all, they should already be made and sitting in the fridge at eye level.
How to actually do it
Cook one protein, one grain, one sauce. That is the whole method. A tray of chicken, a pot of pasta or grain, and one dressing whisked in a jar will carry three different lunches without tasting like the same meal three times.
Rinse grains cold and dress them straight away. Cold water stops pasta cooking and stops it welding into a block. Dressing it warm means it drinks the flavour in rather than sitting in a puddle at the bottom on Wednesday.
Anything crispy travels separately. Pitta chips, nuts, crispy onions, croutons. Put them in a small pot or a corner of the box and add them at your desk. This one habit is the difference between a good lunch and a soggy one.
Cool everything completely before the lid goes on. Warm food in a sealed box steams itself and goes off faster. Give it twenty minutes on the counter.
Three days, not five. Prep Sunday for Monday to Wednesday, then do twenty minutes on Wednesday evening for the rest. Food is better and you are far less likely to be staring at day five chicken wondering if it is fine.
The recipes
Breakfast
All three can be made ahead, and all three are vegetarian. The overnight oats and the baked oats need no reheating at all, so they work at your desk as easily as at your table.
The recipes
Desk lunch
All four are designed to be eaten cold, straight from the box, with no microwave anywhere in the process. One is fully vegetarian and the other three have a vegetarian version.
The recipes
Dinner
Two are burgers, because a burger with 54g of protein in it is not a compromise, it is just a good dinner. One is fully vegan and out-proteins both of them. The cornflake chicken is not really a dinner at all, it is a base you cook once and eat four ways.
The recipes
Sweet treats
These exist because the alternative is pretending you will never want something sweet, and then eating four biscuits from the meeting room at half past three. All three are vegetarian and the blueberry bars are dairy free.
Last thing
Tell me what to cook next
This guide is a first version, and the second one should be shaped by what you actually eat rather than what I assume you want. It takes two minutes and it genuinely changes what I make.
01
Which recipe did you make first, and did you make it again?
02
Was the portion size right for you, or did you finish it still hungry?
03
What stopped you making the ones you skipped? Time, ingredients, or it just did not appeal?
04
What should be in the next guide? A cuisine, a specific dish, a meal you are bored of, whatever it is.
05
Is there anything you would like to watch me cook live rather than read?
06
Any dietary needs this guide missed? Vegetarian, vegan, allergies, anything at all.
The workbook
Your week, on one page
Reading a recipe changes nothing. Planning a week and buying for it changes everything. Pick what you are eating, and the shopping list builds itself from the ingredients.
Homework, before you do anything else
Plan the week
DayBreakfastDesk lunchDinner
Saved on this device. Come back and it will still be here.
Your shopping list
Any questions
Ask me anything about this
There is no such thing as a stupid nutrition question
If something here does not make sense, if a recipe went wrong, if you are not sure whether your numbers look right, or if you have a dietary need this guide missed, send me a message. I read them myself and I would rather answer one question now than have you quietly give up on it in three weeks.
If you want more
Where to go from here
Eleven of these seventeen recipes came out of a book of eighty-two, and a seminar is ninety minutes. If it landed and you want the rest, here is everything.
The full cookbook
Good Vibes, Great Food
Eleven of the seventeen recipes in this guide came out of it, and the page number is on every card. The book has another seventy-two, across breakfast, lunch, dinner and a genuinely unreasonable number of desserts.
- 82 recipes, every one with a full macro breakdown
- A MyFitnessPal barcode on each page, so you scan one code instead of logging twelve ingredients
- Tutorial videos linked from the recipes, so you can watch rather than read
- Swaps on every recipe for dairy free, gluten free, nut free and vegetarian
One to one
Coaching with me
I mainly work with women, and the aim is never a twelve week transformation. It is that you are still doing this in ten years without needing me. Nutrition, training and the cooking skills underneath both.
- Your own macros, adjusted as you go
- Training built around the equipment you actually have
- Weekly check ins and honest accountability
- Taught, not prescribed, so you can run it yourself
Watch me cook
Come to the live workshop
The part people remember is not the slide about protein, it is standing in a kitchen and building a meal prep box with their own hands. If Aldar runs a session, this is what it looks like.
- Build three boxes start to finish in under an hour
- Knife work, batch cooking and the bits recipes never explain
- You take home what you make
Free, and the easiest thing on this page
One new recipe in your inbox, every week
Not a newsletter. One recipe, its macros, and about ninety seconds of something useful about food. That is the whole email. When this guide runs out and you want more, this is where the next one comes from.
No spam, no six part launch sequences, and one click to leave.