Level 1:
I've done both, although I don't lift, I just do bodyweight exercises.
At the moment, I like IIFYM the best. You get to eat whatever you want, but you have to track everything - but you get controlled results. Tracking is more annoying than you think it's going to be, but it's a lot more doable if you either (1) cook everything at home, or (2) eat processed or fast-food that have labels on them. Restaurants are just going to be a guessing game, and are fine for occassional visits, but IIFYM is all about accuracy, not "guesstimating", and
most people who fail at IIFYM just take a stab at guessing at their macro numbers instead of accurately tracking them. It just boils down to simple math. If you want to enjoy food guilt-free & get great results, IIFYM is awesome. Every day is a cheat day. That's not to say you should go nuts &
not eat natural, healthy foods (meat, veggies, fruits, etc.), but it's not going to kill you to eat some Twinkies. I just killed a pint of strawberry ice cream & I feel awesome
This is the calculator I use. I recommend using a burner email because they send a lot of spam:
https://www.iifym.com/iifym-calculator/
You will need a method to track your numbers every day. Most people use a macro app, something like MyFitnessPal or MyMacros or Nutritionix or any of a dozen others. Note that the calculator above is the most accurate one I've found, so while other apps may give you different recommendations as far as your numbers go, I'd stick with the numbers from the link above. It becomes a simple game of food tetris after a few weeks, especially once you've gotten your go-to meals down. Personally I like Nutrionix because (1) I can easily custom-save recipes, and (2) they're the company that provides the nutritional data to all of the fast-food restaurants & whatnot, so everything is already in their database:
https://www.nutritionix.com/app
For me, another big key was having a variety of meals. I get sick of eating your typical meal prep bowls day after day. I need at
least four days of different meals...I don't mind having, say, burgers a couple times a week, but more than that & it just gets old. I am also more apt to eat my own meals if they taste good, which you can easily do with IIFYM because you're not restricting ANY ingredients from your diet. So having tasty meal prep on rotation is what has worked really well for me over time...that way (1) I actually look forward to eating my meals, (2) my meals are prepared ahead of time for the day, so I don't have to think about it - I can just eat, and also know I'm hitting my macros 100%, and (3) I don't get sick of eating the same crap day after day because I've put some thought into setting up a basic menu. It's not rocket science, but for me, that's the foundational plan, and for most people, those are some new processes that they have to add into their daily routines - meal planning, shopping against their list, macro counting, and meal prep.
Level 2: (if you wanna get nuts about it)
The nice thing is, it all boils down to making some checklists, so once you get a solid plan down, it's pretty dang easy to follow - you can quit thinking about stuff & just do it & get great results over time because you have a solid IIFYM foundation setup. I'm currently working towards a month's rotation, where I'm only eating the same thing once a month (or twelve times a year). I use several tools:
1. Meal schedule
2. Weekly categories
3. Flexible menu
4. Time pockets
Meal Schedule:
I do better when I have a clear plan, which begins with IIFYM. Once you know your numbers, then it's time to figure out when you like to eat. 9 meals a day or one meal a day, it's doesn't matter. You can do all the keto & intermittent fasting you want, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to calories in vs. calories out, or more specifically for building muscle, your macros (which add up to your daily calories). So I like the traditional meal plan:
1. Breakfast
2. Lunch
3. Dinner
I'm usually not that hungry when I first wake up, so I have a morning snack first. I also get hungry mid-morning, so I have a brunch snack. And I get hungry early afternoon, so I have an afternoon snack. I also am a sugar addict & love having dessert every day, so I always have dessert after dinner (either right after dinner, or if I'm too full, I wait an hour). So really, my meal schedule looks like this:
1. Morning snack
2. Breakfast
3. Brunch snack
4. Lunch
5. Afternoon snack
6. Dinner
7. Dessert
I also have ADHD & tend to get overly-focused and skip meals because I'm not paying attention, so I put timers on my iPhone to remind me when to eat. Because I keep everything in a giant lunchbox (
Isobag...mine holds 6 trays, plus ice packs), I don't have to do anything more than eat my tasty meal at the specific time, or maybe throw it in a microwave or toaster oven if I want it hot. My current schedule is:
5:00am - Morning snack
7:00am - Breakfast
10:00am - Brunch snack
12:00pm - Lunch
2:00pm - Afternoon snack
5:00pm - Dinner
6:00pm - Dessert
I get sleepy if I have big meals, so I don't usually do a huge meal at breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Like breakfast is usually something like a breakfast burrito packed with eggs, chorizo, cheese, etc. I also aim for drinking a gallon of water a day. When I first wake up, I usually chug 16 ounces to get rehydrated. I also keep a small insulated mug with ice within easy reaching distance for drinking throughout the day, along with a gallon water thermos. The more convenient I can make it, the more apt I am to do it on a consistent basis, and the more inviting I can make it (i.e. having delicious, refreshing ice-cold water available all day thanks to the double-walled, vacuum-insulated thermoses they sell now), the same deal.
Weekly Categories:
For me, meal planning is easiest when done on a weekly basis, that way it doesn't get too overwhelming. I can make a plan for a week & then go shopping once a week pretty easily. I take two approaches:
1. Permuations
2. Categories
So planning out a month's worth of food can be a pretty daunting task when you do the math...7 eating periods a day times 31 days equals 217 "meals" to prepare (I'll lump snacks in with meals for terminology convenience here). So the first approach is permutations. For something like my brunch snack, I'll typically pick something like Energy Bites (basically a
freshly-made granola bar, rolled into a ball...doesn't require cooking & they freeze really well!). Energy Bites can be made in endless flavors...coconut-date, chocolate-chip-oatmeal, lemon-granola, brownie bite, and so on. They take about 5 minutes to get all of the ingredients out, stir together, roll into balls, freeze to harden for a couple hours, and then throw into a Ziploc Freezer gallon bag. I do the same thing with quesadillas...they taste fantastic
once you learn the tricks to making great ones, and can be made in an endless variety of flavors (chicken salad, tuna salad, scrambled egg, steak & cheese, etc.), and also freeze well. And both of those things are snacks that I enjoy eating & look forward to every day because I know they're gonna be good! The same can go for the morning snack as well...yogurt parfaits made with different berries, or smoothies made with frozen fruit & vanilla protein powder, or various types of oatmeal in a small bowl (overnight oats, hot oatmeal, steel-cut oatmeal - you can do walnut/cinnamon/apple oatmeal, brown sugar & slices of banana, etc.). Or for lunch, I usually like chicken. I do a lot of chicken dishes in my Instant Pot - crack chicken, chicken marsala, chicken parmigiana, honey garlic chicken breasts, etc. Chicken is basically an infinitely-combinable food, so even though I typically have chicken for lunch every day, you can basically make it whatever flavor you want - sweet or savory.
For dinner, I like to have dinner at the table with my family so we can talk & catch up & enjoy a good meal together, so that's usually where I put more effort in. I've broken it down into categories by week to help make planning easier:
1. American
2. Italian
3. Latino
4. Asian
5. Ethnic
6. Pizza
7. Date night
We make an effort to get out of the house once a week for date night, so that's kind of our "eat whatever" night - try a new restaurant, go to an old favorite, or if we can't find a babysitter, at least try a new recipe. For the rest of them, I only need 4 or 5 meal options, since it's only once a week (4 weeks a month, plus the odd extra day, depending on the length of the month). So like, for Asian night, these are my go-to options:
1. Gyozas (pot stickers)
2. Beef & broccoli
3. Pork belly on steamed bao buns (yay sous vide!)
4. General Tso's chicken
5. Orange chicken
For pizza, we may rotate through a cheese pizza (Pizza Margherita), a pepperoni, etc. Again, none of this is too hard because you're basically breaking everything down into little categories and making checklists, so you only have to do the up-front thinking once (if you're doing a month's meal plan & don't want to change it after that) & it's all by topic, so nothing gets too overwhelming.
Flexible Menu:
One other trick I picked up is doing a flexible menu. Tuesday doesn't
have to be Taco Tuesday. For me, food is very mood-based, especially dinner. So even though I have my categories listed out for the week (American, Italian, Latino, etc.), because I've done the shopping for the whole week, I can pick & choose what to make on which day. That gives you a little bit more freedom, in case you're feeling locked into an unshakable menu system.
Time Pockets:
Anyway, speaking of overwhelming, preparing all that food is a HUGE mental load. But, it actually doesn't have to be much work if you treat it like any other household chore - you do a little bit at a time, but you do that little bit every day, so your inventory builds up. So like with the Energy Bites: after work on Monday, you make one flavor. Takes all of 5 minutes to make a big batch. After work on Tuesday, you make another flavor, and so on. Rather than spending hours cooking & doing meal prep, you can break it up over time. Like, the basic Energy Bites recipe makes about 24 balls. They last a couple months in the freezer, if you use a good ziploc freezer bag, and they thaw out overnight in the fridge just fine. A week's worth of prep (like maybe doing one batch a day for seven days when you first wake up) means you get a pretty good variety & only have to do that prep like six times a year.
So it's kind of the divide & conquer approach: find your macros. Decide on a meal schedule, so you know when you're eating and how many times you're eating. Put together a menu of foods you like using categories & permutations to create snack & meal options that you'll enjoy eating. Use a flexible schedule during the week to shake up your meal schedule if you need some variety & are feeling stuck. Use time pockets to build up your meal-prep inventory slowly over time so that you have a lot of variety to choose from (so you don't get sick of eating the same thing day after day!) without having to make a huge time investment. I use a couple other tricks to help as well, namely a deep-freeze & kitchen appliances like the Anova & Instant Pot. Those let me quickly & automatically cook my food & then store them in bulk (in individual serving sizes) in the freezer.
So it's kind of a bunch of really simple processes strung together to meet my top-level goals: to eat my macros every day & not get sick of eating the same garbage day after day after day. At first blush, that's a very daunting task, but the above post is basically the procedure I've developed over the years to help me get a handle on it (1) without getting overwhelmed from the sheer amount of work involved (from menu planning to shopping to meal prep), and (2) actually deliver on my plan (especially in terms of realistic convenience, i.e. putting tasty food that I actually want to eat into my lunchbox so that when my food alarms go off on my phone, I can enjoy a breakfast burrito, energy bite, sandwich, etc. & also know that I am hitting my macros for the day). It's a VERY powerful system that has take me a long time to figure out, and is actually kind of obvious once you read through it, but is pretty hard if you're facing the question of "what should I do & how should I do it?" regarding your food & your health and fitness goals.
Summary:
TL;DR: Just by a month's worth of Soylent at a time & add protein powder to it.