APEX PWR  |  Nutrition Nook + Dad Duty

Boring Meals Work: Taco Night in Three Macro Builds

A couple of weeks ago one of our coaches said, almost as an aside, that he eats the same lunch every single day. Nobody in the room found that remarkable. Which is interesting, because if a client said it, half the internet would tell them they were doing nutrition wrong.

So we asked our staff a question: what is one staple meal in your house? Not your best meal. Not the one you would photograph. The one you actually make, on repeat, without thinking about it.

This is part one of what they sent back. It starts with Colin, our Director of Performance and a dad of multiple kids, which means his kitchen operates under the same constraints as yours: not enough time, more than one appetite, and a hard deadline every evening.

Colin's Staple: Taco Night

Colin Feldtman, CSCS  |  Director of Performance, APEX PWR

One of my family's staple go-to meals is taco night. You can cook a lot of ground beef, turkey or chicken at the same time. Alternatively, you could use a crock pot for shredded chicken, al pastor or birria-style protein. While this cooks, you can prep your toppings to reduce prep time; we occasionally use tomatoes/homemade pico de gallo, radishes and cotija cheese. Taco night is great because you can also make burritos if you are looking to increase calorie intake or make a taco bowl to reduce calories and have a more veggie-forward meal (we will do shredded lettuce along with excessive toppings that I previously listed).

Colin Feldtman, CSCS, Director of Performance, APEX PWR Reproduced as sent, because that is the point

Read that again and notice what he did not say. No macros. No meal prep containers. No Sunday spent portioning food into a wall of tupperware. He described a system: cook a lot of one protein, prep toppings during the dead time while it cooks, then let each person build the version that fits their goal.

That last part is the whole trick, and it is why we picked his answer to lead the series.

Jennie Carolan, MS  |  Director of Nutrition, APEX PWR

Why Boring Is the Feature, Not the Bug

Variety is a fine goal once the habit exists. It is a terrible starting point. At the beginning, every new meal is three separate problems: figuring out what to make, buying the right things, and then working out what you just ate so you can record it. Multiply that by twenty-one meals a week and the plan collapses under its own logistics.

A staple meal collapses all three problems at once. You can cook it without a recipe, shop for it without a list, and log it without a search, because you have logged it before.

That third one gets underrated. Food logging is not hard because tracking is hard. It is hard because at the start, every single entry is a new lookup. When the same base shows up three times a week, your app already knows it. Recording dinner goes from a four-minute chore to about fifteen seconds, and a habit that takes fifteen seconds is a habit that survives a busy week.

Taco Night in Three Builds, With Real Numbers

Colin's framework is his. The portions below are ours, built by the APEX nutrition team to show what his three variations actually look like when you put numbers on them. Every value was calculated from published nutrition data, not estimated, and the sources are listed at the bottom of this page.

The base for all three: 4 oz of cooked seasoned protein, pico de gallo, sliced radishes and a light crumble of cotija. What changes is what you put it in.

That is a 431-calorie spread across the same dinner, and protein never drops below 42 grams. A parent eating in a deficit and a teenage athlete trying to gain weight can sit at the same table, eat the same food, and both be on plan. Nobody is cooking twice.

The bowl uses 99% lean ground turkey and the other two use 93/7 ground beef, which accounts for part of the calorie gap. Here is what that swap is actually worth, per 4 oz cooked.

All three land within a few grams of each other on protein. So switching proteins is a fat and calorie decision, not a protein decision, and that is a genuinely useful thing to know when you are staring at a meat case trying to do math.

How to run it

1. Brown 2 lb of ground protein in one pan, about 12 to 15 minutes, or put 2 lb of chicken breast in a crock pot on low for four hours. Two pounds raw gives you roughly 24 oz cooked, which is six 4 oz portions.
2. Prep the toppings while it cooks. This is Colin's actual insight and the reason the meal is fast. You are using time you were already spending.
3. Warm the beans. Cook rice and warm flour tortillas only if someone is building a burrito.
4. Put it all out and let people build to their own target.
5. Log it once. Next taco night takes fifteen seconds to record.

Structure and Support, Which Is the Part Most People Are Missing

Nothing above is complicated. That is deliberate. But knowing that staple meals work is not the same as having a set of them that fits your body, your schedule and your actual goal, and this is the gap where most people stall out.

Two things close it. The first is structure: knowing your numbers, having two or three meals that hit them, and knowing how to rearrange those meals when the day goes sideways. The second is support: somebody who looks at what you actually ate and tells you the one thing to change, instead of leaving you to interpret your own data at 11pm.

Our nutrition services exist to provide both, and they are led by Jennie Carolan, MS, our Director of Nutrition, who has spent more than a decade doing exactly this work with real households.

All three are delivered remotely, so you do not need to live anywhere near us to work with our team. We coach clients across the country.

Where Supplements Fit, Which Is After the Food

A repeatable dinner beats a shelf of supplements, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The taco night above delivers over 40 grams of protein from whole food in every configuration. That is the work.

Supplements close specific gaps, and there are three common ones once the meals are handled.

• Protein powder, when your daily target is genuinely hard to reach from food. A scoop in the morning is often the difference between hitting 140 g and hitting 110 g.
• Omega-3s, if fish is rare in your house. Most American diets are short here and taco night does not fix it.
• A basic multivitamin, as cheap insurance during the stretch where your eating is still inconsistent.

We partner with Thorne for a specific reason. The supplement industry is loosely regulated, and Thorne's NSF Certified for Sport line is batch tested against banned substances, which matters if you or your kid is drug tested at any level of sport.

Ordering through the APEX Thorne page attaches 25% off for life to your Thorne account across the whole catalog. There is no code to paste, the discount applies to every order after the first, and you do not need to be a client, a patient, or an Oregon resident. Anyone in the United States can use it.

Coming Next in the Series

Part 2 goes to Kevin, the coach whose offhand comment about eating the same lunch every day started this whole thing. Part 3 is Jeron's staple, and like Colin's it has to survive a house with multiple kids in it.

If you want the honest version of what our staff eats, that is what this series is. Not photogenic. Repeatable.

Nationwide, and Also Right Here

Nutrition coaching and the Thorne discount are available to anyone in the United States. Our facility is at 11105 SW Greenburg Rd in Tigard, Oregon, where the in-person work happens: strength training, physical therapy, DEXA scanning and VO2 max testing, for clients across Tigard, Beaverton, Lake Oswego, Tualatin and the greater Portland metro.

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