MONSTER 2.0 — The Kitchen

The training half of this is already written — MONSTER 2.0 — The Blueprint, six days a week, chest and back, legs, shoulders and arms, then the variations. That article covers what happens under the bar. This one covers the other half, which is where a recomposition is actually won or lost.

The goal is specific: strip roughly 10 kg of fat while holding or adding muscle. And there is one complication that shapes everything below — I am on a triple GLP-1/GIP/glucagon agonist. Appetite is suppressed and gastric emptying is slowed, so the failure mode is not overeating. It is accidentally under-eating protein and paying for it in lean mass.

Here is the whole day in one table, then the food. The reasoning is further down — you do not need it to cook.

The day

Every recipe is built to hit its own feed's numbers, which makes them interchangeable. Pick any Anchor, any Bridge, any Load, any Rebuild, any Taper — that is 5,120 distinct days. Across all 5,120 the day lands between 2,392 and 2,526 kcal and between 223 and 226 g of protein. The calories move about 3% either side depending on what you pick; the protein does not move at all.

M1 · ANCHOR — 07:30

40 g protein · 45 g carbs · 14 g fat · 466 kcal

Breakfast exists to bank 40 g of protein before the appetite suppression accumulates. Animal Pak and Animal Greens go here, with the first coffee.

M2 · BRIDGE — 10:30

30 g protein · 25 g carbs · 8 g fat · 292 kcal

Deliberately small. The job is to move another 30 g of protein across the line without triggering the early fullness of a real meal. Semi-liquid textures win on hard days. Second coffee goes here.

M3 · LOAD — 11:45

45 g protein · 60 g carbs · 12 g fat · 528 kcal

The pre-training meal, 75 minutes before the first set. Biggest carbohydrate hit of the day, and it exists to fuel the session. Animal Omega and Animal Flex go here.

POST · CATCH — 14:30

30 g protein · 30 g carbs · 2 g fat · 258 kcal

Liquid, on purpose. Thirty minutes after the last set appetite is at its lowest point of the day and a plate of chicken is unappealing. A shake is not. Whey, glutamine and creatine here.

M4 · REBUILD — 16:30

45 g protein · 50 g carbs · 20 g fat · 560 kcal

The biggest plate of the day, two hours after the shake. Carbohydrate is still pointed backwards at the session — glycogen resynthesis runs for hours, not minutes.

M5 · TAPER — 19:00

35 g protein · 10 g carbs · 19 g fat · 351 kcal

The last food of the day. Closes protein, holds carbohydrate to 10 g, and clears the way for the pre-bed shots roughly two hours later. Animal PM at bedtime.

The training window, minute by minute

Two honest notes on that stack, both covered in more depth in No Capsule Adds Hours. Creatine timing is irrelevant — saturation is what matters, so only the daily total counts. Pick one: 5 g once, or 2.5 g pre and 2.5 g post. What you do not want is 5 g twice simply because creatine appears twice on the schedule. Past saturation the extra buys nothing.

And glutamine is not muscle-retention insurance. The evidence for performance or hypertrophy in someone already eating 225 g of protein is weak. If it seems to settle your gut, keep it and call it what it is — personal experience, not established. Drop it without guilt otherwise.

Audit every label, not just the pre-workout. Omega softgels are pure fat, greens powders and sweetened electrolytes carry carbs, and anything that goes in the coffee counts. All of it comes out of the food plan rather than sitting invisibly on top of the 2,455. The coffee itself is free if it is black.

Why the numbers are what they are

Mifflin-St Jeor on 105 kg, 182 cm, age 44 gives a basal rate of 1,972 kcal. An activity factor of 1.5 — six training days plus real walking volume — puts maintenance near 2,959 kcal. The target is 2,455 kcal, a deliberate 17% deficit, predicting roughly 0.45 kg of fat a week. Ten kilos is therefore about a 22-week project.

The obvious question is why not cut harder and finish faster. The answer came out of my own bloodwork.

Protein is fixed at 225 g — 2.14 g per kg of bodyweight, or roughly 3.0 g per kg of lean mass taking lean mass at about 75 kg, which is an estimate off BMI and not a scan. Testosterone replacement raises recovery capacity, but it does not make protein optional. And because appetite is no longer a reliable reminder to eat, six deliveries of 30-45 g are far easier to actually finish than two enormous meals.

Carbohydrate is 220 g, not zero. Keto ended in July and the metabolic data argues for using carbs deliberately: HbA1c 5.7 → 5.4 and HOMA-IR 1.78 → 0.90. Insulin sensitivity is in good shape, which is the condition under which putting carbohydrate around training makes sense rather than being a liability. Load, the shake and Rebuild carry 140 g — 64% of the day's total — inside the window from 11:45 to 16:30.

One honest note on the schedule: Bridge at 10:30 and Load at 11:45 are only 75 minutes apart, and on a slow-emptying day that is too much too close together. When it is, merge them — 75 g of protein in one 11:15 meal is a perfectly good day. The clock is a default, not a rule.

Why the day ends at 19:00

CJC-1295 supplies a GHRH-type signal and ipamorelin hits the ghrelin receptor, but pituitary growth-hormone release is still governed by the balance between those stimulatory signals and somatostatin, the main inhibitory one. A large glucose and insulin excursion shortly before the injections pushes that balance the wrong way.

So the final meal is at 19:00, deliberately low in carbohydrate, and the pre-bed shots go in roughly two hours later. This does not produce zero insulin — protein raises insulin too — but it removes an entirely avoidable collision.

Water, salt and coffee

Five litres is already the habit. Spreading it beats forcing it:

Five litres, an hour of training, Medellín's climate and a GLP-1 agonist together make sodium consistency matter more than usual. Plain water without enough salt can make hydration feel worse rather than better. The 1 g in each savoury recipe, whatever the food carries, and any electrolyte product all belong in the same count. Himalayan salt is fine sodium chloride, but its trace minerals are far too small to be a strategy on their own.

Both coffees before 10:30. If the pre-workout has caffeine, 12:45 is a third dose landing about nine hours before bed — roughly two average caffeine half-lives, so a meaningful fraction is still circulating at lights out. When sleep quality starts sliding, that is the first variable to pull.

The rest day

Protein stays at 225 g. Fat stays at 75 g. Carbohydrate drops by about 60 g, putting the day near 160 g of carbs and 2,215 kcal.

Do not build a second menu. Drop the fruit out of the post-workout shake but keep its 30 g of protein if the liquid feed helps appetite. Then take roughly 20 g of carbs off the Load starch and 10 g off Rebuild. The protein schedule, the 19:00 cutoff and the empty-stomach window are unchanged. Carbohydrate falls because training demand fell. Protein never does.

Which also means the weekly average is not 2,455. Six training days at 2,455 plus one rest day at 2,215 averages 2,421 kcal — call it an 18% deficit rather than 17%. And the maintenance figure it is measured against is itself an estimate: the real one comes out of three or four weeks of weight and waist numbers, not out of an equation.

Air fryer settings, in one place

Each recipe already carries its own settings, so this is a reference for anything you cook outside the plan. All AirFry mode unless noted.

The BBQ plate earns its place on exactly one thing: wagyu ribeye. Get it properly hot, no oil, two minutes a side, rest it four. An air fryer will cook a ribeye but it will not crust it. Everything else that wants a fast sear — burgers, chicken for a bowl, shrimp — goes on the plate or in a sartén, and the air fryer takes the hands-off work: starches, trays, anything you want to walk away from.

The weekly shop

Inventory for a seven-day rotation, not a list of things to eat every day. Pick the recipes first, then scale.

The egg line is not a typo. Six recipes use separated whites, and the sausage hash alone wants eight eggs. If separating that many at 07:00 stops being charming, a carton of liquid egg whites replaces them one-for-one by weight — it is convenience, not a requirement, and every recipe here works either way. The yolks are not waste: keep them for something else or bin them, but do not eat them back into the plan or the fat number moves.

On the tuna: buy light or skipjack, not albacore — albacore runs roughly three times the mercury, and a mix-and-match structure makes it easy to eat tuna most days without noticing. Rotate it against the white fish and the shrimp.

And note the wagyu line: two or three portions across the whole week, not seven burgers plus steaks plus sausages. In a deficit wagyu is a flavour allocation, not a protein source.

Batch what you can. Rice keeps two days — cool it fast and refrigerate within the hour, because cooked rice left standing is the textbook way to grow something reheating will not fix. Egg cups keep three days. Potatoes and sweet potatoes can be cubed and chilled the night before, which takes five minutes off every breakfast.

Six things worth adding to the shop

The current ingredient list can run this plan. It is just harder and more expensive than it needs to be.

Liquid egg whites belong on this list too, with an asterisk: they are pure convenience. Six of the recipes call for separated whites and the plan runs fine on whole eggs and a steady hand. Buy the carton when the separating starts costing you more than the money saves.

The point of all of it

Six training days a week is the loud part. It is also the part that fails quietly if the kitchen does not hold up its end. Twenty-two weeks at a 17% deficit with 225 g of protein a day is not dramatic and is not supposed to be — it is the boring arithmetic that lets the training convert into something. The sessions themselves are logged as they happen, most recently in Three of Six.

The number I keep coming back to is IGF-1 falling to 214 across three months of peptides meant to push it the other way. That is not an argument against the protocol. It is an argument for feeding it properly, which is the entire reason this document exists.

Now it is 25 recipes and one table. Pick one from each row and stop thinking about it.