TRT Diet Plan: A Full Week at My Table

A TRT diet plan isn’t a secret handshake. Mine is seven days of ordinary food, written down and run on repeat, and I’m going to give you the whole week — Monday to Sunday, the way it actually lands on my table. No magic foods, no protocol talk. Just what a big man on testosterone therapy eats when he’s cooking for himself and paying attention.

I’ve been on TRT for fifteen years now, since I was thirty-five. My what-TRT-changed piece was the story half — the steadier appetite, the early water, the bloodwork your fork has a say in. This one is the doing half. If you read that and thought fine, Magnus, but what do I actually cook on a Tuesday — here’s Tuesday, and the other six.

One thing before we set the table: everything below is a replacement dose talking. It’s food, not medicine, and it isn’t medical advice — your labs and your dose live between you and your doctor. What I can hand you is the plate. So let’s build the week.

How I build the week before I build a plate

A plan you can’t explain is a plan you’ll quit. So before I show you a single meal, here’s the logic underneath all seven days. Get these four things right and the specific foods barely matter.

Protein first, every meal, on purpose. This is the spine of any TRT meal plan I’ve ever run. Testosterone plus training builds muscle, but only if the raw material keeps showing up. I aim for a real protein source at each of my meals — roughly 40 grams, a palm-and-a-half of meat, fish or eggs. Across the day, most lifters do well between 1.6 and 2.2 grams of protein per kilo of bodyweight. You don’t need to bury yourself past that: a large meta-analysis found gains in lean mass stop climbing once you’re eating past about 1.6 g/kg a day.^[1] For a 90-kilo man that’s around 160 to 180 grams. Not heroic. Just consistent.

Spread it out. Here’s the part most men miss. Your body can only do so much with one enormous protein hit — the muscle-building signal from a meal maxes out somewhere around 20 to 40 grams,^[4] so a day that’s dry at breakfast and lunch and then dumps everything at dinner leaves growth on the table. When researchers fed people the same daily protein but spread it evenly across three meals instead of loading it at night, 24-hour muscle protein synthesis ran about 25% higher.^[3] That’s why every day below carries protein at breakfast, midday and dinner, not just supper.

Carbs around the work. Rice, potatoes, oats, fruit — I aim them at my training days and my training hours, when the muscle actually wants them. TRT recovers you faster, so the training earns its carbs. On a rest day I pull them back a touch. I don’t fear them and I don’t scatter them at random.

Fats mostly the good kind, veg on half the plate. A thumb of fat per meal from fish, olive oil, nuts or avocado — this is where you quietly steer your cholesterol on therapy. And half the plate green or colorful most meals, because that’s where the fiber and potassium live, which is your blood-pressure insurance.

And water, which people forget is part of a diet. Testosterone nudges you to build more red blood cells, and over the years I’ve learned my own body holds fluid unevenly when I’m not drinking steadily. So water runs through my whole day, not just at the gym. It won’t fix a genuine bloodwork problem — that’s a doctor conversation — but staying watered is the cheapest, simplest thing on this list, and I treat it as a meal I never skip. That’s the whole framework. Everything from here is just filling it in.

The seven-day plan, laid out

This is the printable week — the one I actually run, give or take what’s in the fridge. Three training days (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) carry a little more carbohydrate; the rest lean protein-and-veg. Every meal has its protein anchor. Read it as a shape to steal, not a prison — swap any dish for one you like that hits the same anchor.

Look at the rhythm rather than the exact dishes. Protein three times a day, every day. Carbs stacked onto the training-day rows. Oily fish twice in the week — Monday and Thursday — so my lipids stay boring. And Sunday does double duty: one roast chicken becomes lunch, dinner, and the start of Monday’s bowls. That’s the trick to running this without living at the stove.

A few days, walked through properly

A table tells you the what. It doesn’t tell you the feel of it, so let me walk you through three of the days the way they actually go.

Monday — the heaviest day

Monday I train hard, so Monday eats the most. Breakfast is steak and eggs with spinach — protein, iron and greens done before the house wakes up, and it sets me up so I’m not chasing hunger at ten a.m. Midday is a Mediterranean chicken bowl: chicken, rice, olives, cucumber, a slick of olive oil. That’s my carbs landing near my session. Dinner is a salmon and avocado plate with a potato — one of my two oily-fish nights, deliberately placed to balance the red meat earlier. Skyr and berries before bed if I’m still hungry, which on a training day I usually am.

Thursday — a plainer day

Thursday I don’t train, so it’s quieter. Same steak and eggs to open, because I like it and it’s fast, then a beef and rice bowl at midday and salmon again at night with asparagus instead of potato — a little less starch on a rest day. Nothing clever. The point of a plan is that most days aren’t events; they’re just fed. Thursday is a fed day.

Sunday — cook once, eat for days

Sunday is the engine of the whole week. I roast a couple of chickens and a tray of vegetables in the afternoon, the kitchen smells like a proper home, and that one cook feeds Sunday lunch, Sunday dinner, and gets carved into the containers that become Monday and Tuesday’s midday protein. I found this rhythm during the Covid lockdowns, when I first properly learned to cook, and it stuck because it works. One serious cooking session buys you a week of not deciding.

The first plan I ever wrote down was on the back of a training log during lockdown, in a Chicago kitchen that had never seen me cook before. I’d been on TRT for years by then and had never once organized the eating around it — I just grabbed food between sets of the rest of my life. So I sat with a pen and mapped a week: protein at every meal, fish twice, carbs on the days I lifted. Ugly handwriting, a pink apron I’d bought as a half-joke, two daughters wandering in asking what smelled good. That scrap of paper is basically the table you’re reading now. Nothing about it is clever. It just got written down, and written down beats remembered every single week.

Running it without living in the kitchen

The plan on paper is easy. The plan on a Wednesday when you’re tired is where men fall off. So here’s how I keep it standing.

Cook the protein in bulk, plate it fresh. I roast, sear or bake protein two or three times a week — Sunday’s chickens, a tray of chicken thighs, a batch of chilli — and I keep it in the fridge in containers. Then dinner is just heating protein and building fresh veg and carbs around it. That’s ten minutes, not an hour.

Keep swaps honest. Every dish in that table is really a slot: “40 grams of protein plus a vegetable plus a carb if it’s a training day.” Don’t like cod? Any white fish, chicken or lean beef drops straight in. Hate skyr? Cottage cheese or a whey shake does the same job. The plan survives swaps as long as the anchor stays. What kills it is swapping a protein meal for a not-protein meal and pretending it’s the same.

Keep the boring backups stocked. Eggs, tinned tuna, skyr, cottage cheese, frozen veg, a bag of rice, a tub of whey. When the day goes sideways and dinner won’t happen, three eggs and a handful of spinach is still a real meal. A whole egg carries about 6 grams of protein,^[5] so three of them and some cheese covers a small meal in five minutes. The backup meal being genuinely easy is what keeps a bad day from becoming a bad week.

This week is not expensive. Look back over the table and count the pricey stuff — a bit of salmon twice, some steak. The rest is eggs, chicken, tuna, rice, oats, cottage cheese, frozen vegetables. That’s deliberate. A plan that only works on a big grocery budget is a plan you’ll abandon the first tight month, and abandoning it is far more expensive than any cut of meat. Buy the whole chickens, buy eggs by the flat, keep the freezer stocked, and the whole week costs less than the two takeaways it replaces. Good eating on therapy has never needed to be fancy. It needs to be there when you open the fridge.

Where the printable version lives

People search “testosterone diet plan pdf” hoping for a laminated sheet that does the thinking for them. I understand the impulse — I wrote mine on paper for exactly that reason. But a PDF frozen to one man’s bodyweight, one man’s training days and one man’s fridge is worth less than the framework that made it.

So instead of handing you a static file, the printable version of this week lives inside my free 7-day plan — with the portions already sized, the shopping list built, and the protein anchors set so you can print it, stick it to the fridge, and run it Monday. It’s the same shape as the table above, just filled in properly for a real week. If you’d rather understand the whole approach to eating on therapy before you commit to a week, the eating-on-TRT hub gathers it in one place.

When this plan needs to change

I have to be straight with you here, because it matters. Everything above is written for a replacement dose — testosterone therapy bringing a low man back to a normal level. That’s what I’m on most of the time, and that’s who this week is for.

If you’re running more than that from time to time, the way I do, the whole picture gets louder. Appetite climbs, water comes on heavier, the markers your doctor watches all shout instead of murmur, and the plate genuinely has to change with them — more food to match the work, tighter attention to sodium and leanness, more honesty with your bloodwork. That’s a different animal on the same kitchen, and I wrote it up separately in whether you actually need to eat more on TRT. Less was always safer for me than more; I’ll leave the dose talk there and here, only ever, with your doctor.

Wherever you sit on that line, the bones don’t move: protein at every meal, carbs earned by training, good fats, water all day, and a doctor who reads your labs. Run a plan you’ll still be cooking in a year and your bloodwork rewards you slowly and for real. Novelty doesn’t move a single number. Come get the week that’s already sized for you and let’s get you fed properly, big man. I’ve got you.

Written by

Magnus Olafsson

The cook behind Slim Diet Era. Former Swedish stage competitor (B&K Classic Body Show, Swedish Grand Prix), on TRT since 35, cooking high-protein food in Chicago for his husband, two kids, and you. He counts the macros so you don’t have to.

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