David Taylor Gonzales

I mentioned in my last blog that I wanted to capture and share what I eat in a day. There’s a couple reasons for writing this. The first reason is to show y’all what I am doing for fuel during before, during, and after training. The second reason is because nutrition is an area of health that I have consistently lacked discipline in, even well into my weight loss journey two years ago. It really wasn’t until I got serious about this big marathon goal that I started to really seriously analyze what I put in my body and paying attention to macronutrients. I think sharing what I’m doing now that I have some discipline under my belt might be helpful to someone who is early in their weight loss journey as well. I find that what I do is fairly affordable and easy to execute and that has been the key to any long term discipline I’ve experienced in my life.

To answer a common question right off the bat, no, I do not count calories. I am not a bodybuilder and I have no intention of entering that world. I’m pretty happy with my physique overall and I don’t see any utility in tracking my nutrition that closely in this current training block, especially because my caloric needs fluctuate wildly from day to day. I try to keep my eating intuitive: if I’m hungry, I eat and try to make the best nutrition choice available.

Alright so, let’s get started. Today is Thursday, October 2nd. Usually dinners are planned a week in advance by my wife but we are missing our weekly house church meeting where food is usually provided so it’s unclear what we’ll have tonight. I suspect I’ll be grilling chicken when I get home from work but we’ll see.

There is no training on the schedule today. However, my breakfast is the same everyday regardless of training: 2 eggs, 4 servings of egg whites, one slice of sourdough bread with Cholula hot sauce. Estimated macros: 36g of protein, 45g of carbohydrates, 15g of fat. One critique I have of my breakfast is that I should probably make it a more carb heavy meal since I’m eating that meal after a run 5/7 days of the week.

After breakfast, I usually drink water with 1 tsp of creatine monohydrate to promote brain health, muscle hypertrophy and reduce inflammation. My creatine supplement suggests two tsp daily but from what I’ve read, that’s only necessary if I’m trying to “load” my body with creatine within a week. I don’t see the need for that and I’m halving the dose so that I’ll be fully loaded by my race day and reducing the risk of GI issues from loading the creatine into my system too quickly. My creatine of choice is Optimum Nutrition’s orange passionfruit. It tastes fine. I don’t hate it but it’s not my favorite flavor by any stretch. I’m sure there are better flavors out there so keep that in mind.

I take my coffee to work everyday in a tumbler but I don’t drink any of it at home. I try to delay my caffeine intake until around 8:30 AM. Someone on a podcast said that delaying caffeine for 90 minutes after waking is good for your Circadian rhythm and since I don’t depend on coffee for waking me up, I figure it doesn’t hurt me to do. The macros and calories for coffee are negligible.

I take my lunch to work almost every day but the meal varies. Usually I’m taking leftovers from last night’s dinner and that’s what we’re doing today. Last night we had our egg and pork “slop” bowls with kidney beans, spinach, red onion, garlic, and nutritional yeast. This is one of my favorite meals Lane makes throughout the week. Even microwaved the next day this meal is an all time favorite for me. Estimated macros: 15g of protein, 35g of carbs, 8-9g of fat. If I had to nitpick this meal, I wish I had bought a leaner pork for lower fat content but that’s a really minor issue since I ate this on an off day. I also had the rest of my tub of greek yogurt that I had in the mini fridge at work. Estimated macros on that: 14g of protein, 6g of carbs, 3g of fat. I didn’t have a full serving left in the tub so the macros on a full serving 2/3 of a cup are slightly better than what I had (17g protein, 8g carbs, 5g fat).

As a snack in the afternoon, I’ll drink a meal replacement whey protein shake around 2 PM. I always get hungry before dinner so the protein shake has become a must have otherwise I’ll snack on the candy on my coworker’s desk all day. My whey protein is the Gold Standard Vanilla Ice Cream flavor by Optimum Nutrition, you can pick it up from Costco for around $60 and you get 80 servings per container so it’s pretty affordable compared to something like Transparent Labs which I see all over Youtube nowadays. Estimated macros: 24g protein, 4g carbs, 1g fat. By the way, I’m not sponsored by Optimum Nutrition and I know I’ve mentioned them twice in this blog. It’s important to me that y’all know this blog generates literally $0 in revenue lol.

Tonight’s dinner is chicken and rice. It’s one of my favorites that my wife makes during the fall and winter season. If I know her, she’ll make it with her parmesan baked broccoli which will make me fart a lot but it’s delicious.

Update: I guessed right! We had chicken and rice with the delicious broccoli. I had one chicken breast with rice and about a half cup of broccoli. Estimated macros: 40g protein, 40g carbs, 20g fat. A critique of this meal for the sake of macros, it’s a little high in fat. Most of my meals are. What can I say, I love olive oil and I married an Italian woman who loves cheese.

My carbs were very low in the evening so I ate some Pretzel Crisps with chocolate chips while watching The Office with Lane before bed. I always overeat these things but thankfully they have 0g of fat so the stakes are pretty low when I get out of wack eating them. I had about 2.5 servings which comes out to 5g of protein, 60g of carbs (probably about 10g of chocolate chips as well) , and 12g of fat.

Total macros for the day: 129g of protein (on target), 200g of carbs (off target), 59g of fat (roughly on target). This was a rough estimate and I’m not an expert in nutrition so it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about these numbers. Take that for what you will. The macronutrient count wasn’t the point of the blog. I felt like I was on track today but I did feel like I was a bit higher on fat than 59g so it’s possible that the estimate is incorrect. The carbohydrate number is worth monitoring because I really should be getting closer to 350g for my bodyweight (170 pounds). Most people training for a marathon try to shoot for well over 300g of carbs per day (up to 500g in some cases). I will be working to incorporate more grains and fruits into my diet in the next 3 weeks.

It’s not lost on me that I introduced this blog as an opportunity to share what I eat before, during and after my runs and then proceeded to share a rest day’s nutrition instead. I’ll take a moment here to share what I change in my nutrition on my long run days, since those can look quite a bit different than Thursdays. Pre-run: overnight oats with whole milk and chocolate chips. Post run: family breakfast which includes protein pancakes, bacon, eggs and egg whites, and homemade sourdough pan fried with coconut oil (don’t knock it till you try it). Lunch: grazing on leftovers from the week. Usually there’s a leftover pasta of some sort that I’ll take. A protein shake is included here or a magnesium supplement if I’m still quite sore from the training load. Dinner: something high carb, not particularly healthy. Pizza is a common choice but we sometimes do street tacos with grilled chicken.

This was a fun one to write! I am always learning and I’m never perfect. I hope this blog was insightful, and, maybe even helpful.

Keep Going!