Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

p.m.) Your meals prior to this will consist of protein and fat.
    On workout days, it’s best to have carbs after your workout; for this reason, we recommend training a bit later in the day. Your first meal of the day should consist of protein and fat and would ideally take place about three to four hours before your workout. Your next meal would be immediately after your workout, and all the allotted carbs for the day should be eaten then.
    EATING 101: FOOD CHOICES AND HOW TO BUILD YOUR MEALS
    W e want to make your new style of eating as simple as possible. We know that there will be an adjustment period, but this approach should be the least restrictive diet you’ve ever tried. For that reason, you have all the freedom to choose the foods you want. In this section we provide an extensive list of foods to choose from to satisfy meal composition and macronutrient requirements during the various phases in this program.
    As should be very clear by now, our utmost goal is to teach you as much as possible about training and nutrition over the course of the program. This way, when you are no longer our Padawan, * you will be able to maintain your new physique by instinct, knowledge, and familiarity.
    To that end, while we’ll give you a few examples of meals, we are literally giving you all the tools necessary to create healthy, physique-friendly meals for yourself, every single day. Remember, part of being Alpha is being self-sufficient—and the ability to feed yourself is a basic human function that has been lost on the men of the world. As an Alpha, it’ll be your job to help reverse the trend. (You should probably learn how to cook, too, but that’s another book altogether.)
    At this time, we would like to introduce you to your new favorite thing: MyPlate by Livestrong.com (www.livestrong.com/myplate). Livestrong.com has one of the most comprehensive food databases in the world, including listings for every food we include on the following lists—and nearly every food we didn’t! MyPlate uses that database to tell you the breakdown of the nutritional content.
    For any food you select from the list (or elsewhere), simply go to the website and type in the name of the food and how much you ate; MyPlate will do the rest. In addition to telling you the calorie content and exactly how many grams of carbs, fat, and protein are in the food, MyPlate can act as your food journal—just set up an account (it’s free), and you can save your meals.
    In order to get the most accurate information, you will need to measure your food, either by weighing it on a food scale (recommended) or making a general estimate (don’t be so lazy). Sure, this is a pain in the ass for the first week or so, but it’s a process that has tremendous long-term benefit: by creating your meals in this way, you will begin to develop an uncanny sense of what a serving size should look like for your body and your goals, even as they change.
    Think of yourself as Daniel-san in The Karate Kid —we’re like Mr. Miyagi, making you do seemingly mundane and pointless tasks, but just when you’re thinking we’ve been wasting your time going all wax-on, wax-off, it turns out— bam —we taught you karate. * Yeah, that’s basically what’s going on here.
    We should mention that if you’re consuming a food that has nutrition information on the package, there’s no need to check the site—always rely on that information for the most accurate nutrition facts. But you should still go ahead and log it on the site for your records.
    Finally, please recognize that for reasons pertaining equally to sanity and spatial constraints, we can’t list every food you can eat—that’s what MyPlate is for. The lists below cover only a fraction of the foods you can eat while on the program; these are just a few dozen items of each type that we eat regularly. Keep in mind that the nutritional guidelines are less concerned with what you eat than they are with when you eat it.
    Engineering the Alpha was designed this way so that people of any dietary discipline can do the program. Whether you’re paleo or vegan, gluten free or a pescatarian, as long as you get the correct number of calories and each macronutrient, and you stick to the meal-timing recommendations, you can eat whatever you like. Within reason. *
    We’re giving you a lot of autonomy here, so be smart and make Alpha decisions.

    CALORIE AND MACRONUTRIENT REQUIREMENTS (OR, HOW MUCH TO EAT)
    Determining