Howdy. My name is James Harkins. I am a Strength Coach with about five years of experience coaching dozens of clients. I focus on driving strength increases for the four primary movements: the Squat, the Deadlift, the Bench Press, and the Overhead Press. Visit the Coaching page to apply today to work with me.

I am also a Software Engineer by trade, and over the years I have developed a dietary routine that some would not unfairly call obsessive, but which I prefer to think of as systematic.

Like most good systems, it is boring by design. Three of my four(ish) daily meals are exactly the same: day in, day out. When I first started doing this, every single one of my meals was identical every day for about nine months.

Perhaps this strikes you as insane, and you're probably not wrong, but in addition to the physical benefits in the gym and on the scale, it has afforded me quite a lot of unexpected free time spent neither in the kitchen nor thinking about what to do in the kitchen.

The logic is straightforward: if you remove the variables, you remove the noise. What's left is signal. You find out very quickly what is and what isn't working, and then adjust accordingly. I am a man with many interests and a young father with many responsibilities. I do not have the bandwidth to debug my nutrition in real time, so I stopped treating it like an art form and started treating it like an engineering problem, and my ease of operation rapidly improved. I'm even at the point now where I get to have some fun along the way, since the bulk of it is fully automated.

I have documented this approach in extreme, grisly detail in the Meal Prep Mercenary Guidebook, of which you can obtain a free copy here. I also publish a newsletter every weekday, in which I try to make thoughtful, pithy, non-procedurally-generated commentary on various health and fitness trends, in addition to chronicling my own experience and miscellaneous observations.

Get your copy today and stop throwing away so much of that most precious resource: free time.

Happy training.